Archive of Our Own ^beta

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MONDAY

The snow had stopped weeks prior but slush still lined the streets of Montreal on the day I got the call back about my manuscript. I remember it clearly because, in fumbling for my Motorola, I misstepped and sunk my entire foot into a greying pile of snow lining the pavement of Rue Saint-Urbain. At the hair-rising sensation of icy wetness claiming my leg up to my shin, I jerked backwards, swallowed a series of heartfelt if borrowed local expletives, and went limping back towards the relative safety of the mall so I could pick up the call in peace.

In relation to my writing I was dealing at the time primarily with a woman named Lisa Szalai. Despite her presumably Eastern European origins, I remember Lisa mostly as a disembodied voice with a New Jersey accent so strong I sometimes wondered if it was an affect. She and Alex did not like each other for reasons never made clear to me, although I suspected they saw each other as competition for the same promotions, set apart from the more homogenous suits at Random House by virtue of deviant gender and sexuality that was so marked in each of them as to render assimilation impossible.

Lisa was a good agent, although I could tell she didn’t particularly care for my work. This bruised my ego and probably influenced the slight coldness that permeated our interactions, but I did not dislike her per se. That I could tell that she was good at her job helped. She had that slightly patronizing, no-bullshit attitude of the businesswomen of the time, tempered with a perversely maternal guiding hand, which I often thought must have appealed to most men on some psychosexual level. For myself I did not like such hardness in women, but in the professional context of our relationship this was irrelevant. In any event, in 1996, the subject of my relationship to women was not one I took any joy in exploring.

My literary debut the year prior had been a modest success, certainly no barnburner but far surpassing my fears of a catastrophic flop. I had garnered some good buzz across the pond, less back home, enough in any event for the publishers to decide there was sense in my trying again. I felt pretty hounded by it, albeit flattered in some sense. It was good to be making money, certainly. I was acutely aware that it would be better if I could get my foot still further in the door.

Alex, of course, probably considered my minor success as much his to claim as mine. The handover to Lisa had not been civil, part of some larger bartering between the two of them. As far as I understood from the gossip that went around the literary circles I was now marginally a part of, I had been traded in for an underperforming thriller series and a hot new historical romance writer.

“Oh my God, I totally plowed through that book,” Judy had informed me, when we’d last spoken some months earlier and she’d somehow managed to extract this information from me. “But you know I love a costume. Corsets just get my juices flowing.”

On this occasion, Lisa had called to give me news that, strictly speaking, was neither good nor bad: Random House was still looking at my manuscript, and I’d have to wait a little longer for a real answer. But she said it in such a way that, even if I had not been reading through the lines, told me what I wanted to hear. I had been fearful of an outright rejection. This was no longer on the cards. Even if I got something back slashed and covered in edits, there would be some kind of deal down the line, ergo I would get paid.

More than anything, I felt relief at the news. For one thing, there was the money, which was a permanent concern to me specifically because at that time Francis still hadn’t quite registered that we didn’t have some secret source of funds in our back pockets. It wasn’t the kind of obliviousness which, in our first year of cohabitation, had led us into arguments so intense the police once showed up at our door (an event which, if nothing else, had demonstrated our lasting ability to close ranks when presented with any kind of law enforcement)- Francis was now at times more obsessive about our finances than I was. But he was incapable of understanding the big picture of a lifetime of self-sufficiency, which left me constantly battling a low-level anxiety about what would happen to us if we took some kind of unforeseen financial hit. The apartment was paid off, but there were bills always, and taxes, and daily expenditure, plus the stuff that made life worth living, so even with our part-time jobs and the minor trickle of income from my book there was never much left by the end of the month.

Beyond the money, there was also the secondary relief that I was not a one-hit wonder, or at the very least that there was enough vague interest in my second novel that it was less likely that the only reason my first one got picked up was the fact that Francis had slept with someone in boarding school who had inherited a cushy publishing job.

Through thanking Lisa for the update, I told myself that I would take any feedback on the chin and bow to the wisdom of the editors, with less of a wounded ego this time around. True, I had not enjoyed the process the first time, but I understood the game better now; I wouldn’t be so sentimental about it.

Once Lisa had said her goodbyes, I considered calling Francis with the news, but decided against it. I had taken Lisa’s call on my way back to campus, and the discussion had held me up a good fifteen minutes, which meant I would have to rush to get to class on time as it was. If I called Francis on the walk over there was a real possibility I would wind up wasting another ten minutes outside my classroom trying to hang up on him. Anyway there was no guarantee he was in the apartment, and I had the only cell phone between us.

As it was, I made it to campus on time, but upon arrival I noticed I had left my textbook in the single set of drawers to my name in the impressively nondescript office I shared with three other lecturers- two female classicists and one Russian literature PHD student. I saw the latter most often, which was ironic given that he was intensely reclusive and seemed to have happened to choose our shared office as his hiding hole of choice. One of the classicists had told me inter nos that she had found a sleeping bag under the desk once.

The hermit was sat typing away at his computer when I came in to get my book, giving me a typically dumbfounded look when I greeted him and not moving at all to allow me better access to my drawer. I saw myself out and made a mental note to tell Marie-Claire I had located her missing fountain pen- namely, chewed to the point of non-function by our colleague- so she could stop leaving Post-It notes about it.

I wound up about ten minutes late to my lecture, which was pretty par for the course. I constantly told myself I would start making an effort to go set up before my students arrived, but whenever I ran late I couldn’t muster up any guilt about it. They were all adults, and it wasn’t like my lectures ran over, and anyway it wasn’t going to kill them to talk amongst themselves for ten minutes every couple of days. If anything it probably balanced itself out, given that they were all ready to go when I arrived.

The lecture itself went more or less smoothly. Two of my usual hand-raisers were off sick, which meant additional effort on my part, but the subject of Athenian epithets went over well, even though we were derailed by an inane discussion considering whether Pallas Athena was to Athena what J Lo was to Jennifer Lopez and so forth.

After class, I dropped my things off in my office, where Olivier still sat wrestling with Pushkin, then took the metro to Place des Arts and swung by the deli before heading home. It had warmed up slightly since the morning and the sludge lining the streets was still further melted and dirtier than ever; I crossed two of the Tremblay children racing home from school, one red-faced and howling after the other, having visibly been upended into the greying snow minutes prior. I avoided both with an ease I would not have possessed on the slippery pavement a year prior.

Francis had the TV on when I came in, which soured my mood, given that Francis usually only succumbed to the television by himself when in a depressive state. I crept inward cautiously as though to catch him in the act like a National Geographic cameraman, and found him stood arms-crossed frowning at the monitor, although he glanced up at my arrival.

“They’ve got a documentary on tonight about the Firearms Act. You know, the gun law thing. I thought it was earlier in the day.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, relaxing. The reforms had been all over the news for months the previous year, as was anything related to the Polytechnique shootings. Like everyone else in Montreal Francis was morbidly obsessed with the incident, for all that neither of us had been anywhere near Canada in 1989.

Like clockwork, Francis gave me one of his usual refrains on the subject. “You just never know, with these things. It honestly shocks me no L.A. gang-bangers decided to shoot up one of your lectures at USC.”

“Lisa called me before my lecture today,” I said, dropping my briefcase and shedding my coat back in the hallway. “About the manuscript.”

“So? What did she say?” Francis demanded, from the living room. I was pretty cool about it when I turned back around, although I felt myself wanting to smile a little.

“I mean, nothing much. She basically just said they were still looking at it, but you know. Sous-entendu they’ll make something of it, I guess.”

“Really, Richard?” Francis exclaimed, the surprise managing to be less insulting than gratifying in its genuineness when he broke into a grin. “Well, that’s good news!”

I was smiling too; I realized I had probably decided against telling Francis earlier in part because I wanted to see him react to the news in person.

“It’s not a guarantee of anything. They’ll probably butcher it in the edit, anyway. But if they think it’ll sell…”

Francis rolled his eyes, undercutting my knowing cynicism entirely, and grabbed me by the shoulder, steering us into the kitchen. “You martyr you. Sit down, I’ll fix us drinks to celebrate another year of not having to burn the piano for firewood.”

“Let’s not get crazy yet,” I said, but I was laughing a little, weirdly proud of myself, like a kid getting his drawings put on the fridge even though he knows they’re not that good. My sheepishness only increased when Francis, having pushed me onto a stool, kissed me firmly before he went to ransack our liquor stores.

We wound up missing the first ten minutes or so of the documentary, waylaid by the decision that what we really wanted for dinner was Vietnamese takeout. To compound Francis’ corruption into middle class hedonism we ended up eating on the couch.

We hadn’t missed anything important. Even if we hadn’t known the bare bones of the story from the news at the time, it had all been retread to death leading up to the legislation being passed the previous year, and it almost always came up at some point in our acquaintance with a local, who all managed somehow to have known someone killed in the shootings, usually in a grotesquely distant way. One of my most in-depth conversations on the subject had been with Maryse Bouchard, who had told me gravely that she felt a personal connection to those poor girls given that her sister’s daughter (who was about to turn fourteen) had once wanted to study architecture at the university.

“I thought they were engineers?”

“Well, Rosalie wouldn’t go for that, I don’t think. It’s a little too butch.”

The documentary was long, and I mostly used the retrospective on gun laws to finish my food and polish off Francis’, since he was still finding his favorites in the Asian take-away trade. I refocused when first the girls and then Marc Lépine entered the picture, school pictures of the girls with big smiles and eighties hair, and always the infamous photo of him with the fixed unsettling grin.

We listened intently as the narrator recounted how Lépine’s Algerian father had hated women and beaten his mother, watched an ex-teacher speak about his repeat failure to complete a college course, heard from an admissions officer whom Lépine had ranted to in April 1989 about feminists taking over men’s jobs. A grave-faced police officer started a droning diatribe about how easily Lépine had purchased his Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle at a local sporting goods store.

“It’s just sick,” Francis said, with distaste, and shuddered where I could feel it, his shoulder jostling mine. “There have to have been signs before he went through with it.”

With distracting clarity, the thought crossed my mind that, if not quite a mass shooter, I had shacked up with a borderline serial killer myself.

I think this line of thinking occurred to us both at around the same time, from the silence that descended between us. My subconscious had latched onto the thought and would not relinquish it easily. At the very least Francis was guilty of multiple counts of negligent homicide or something. More than I was, certainly. A shiver of unease went through me.

We spoke of it sometimes, when forced to address nightmares or when discussing related subjects from our year at Hampden, but between us we had never explicitly retread the circumstances of Bunny’s death, less still to what level we considered ourselves complicit in the crime. Although it was a macabre secret linking us all to one another, I don’t think any of us had more than obliquely addressed our bond as co-conspirators since the FBI investigation, or at least since the fights leading up to Henry’s death. I imagined Charles and Camilla had had words on the subject in the years since, and it was not so far-fetched to imagine that Francis might have gotten into discussions or dramatic arguments about it with the twins in his own right, but for my part I had been left to nurse my guilt (such as it was) by myself.

I was aware, in any event, that Francis didn’t consider himself a killer, in the same way I could not think of myself as a murderer for what happened to Bunny. And truth be told I couldn’t see him that way either, for all that I occasionally felt old disgust flare up in me like a cold sweat at the sight of him. When Francis repulsed me it was on some personal level, detached from his objective criminality.

Even so, for a second, watching him blankly stare at the screen, it occurred to me with worrying certainty that when it came down to it Francis would always save his own skin and wash his hands of the rest.

On the television, Lépine’s suicide-letter-cum-manifesto was being read aloud by a journalist making note of each spelling error, and at the second usage of gratuitous Latin Francis’ face twitched back to life.

« …Le manque de temps (car je m'y suis mis trop tard) à permis que ces féministes radicals survivent. Alea Jacta Est. »

I was too slow in averting my eyes; Francis glanced to me out of school-boy instinct, and paused a cautious moment before his expression settled, brows rising truculently.

“I mean, a Caesar quote, in a letter like that. It’s bordering self-parody.”

“Christ,” I said, in admonishment, but the moment had passed, and I felt no more need than usual to guard against being knifed in my sleep. I was thinking instead of Francis quoting Rimbaud in his suicide note, which, I had to admit, was a much classier way to go.

TUESDAY

Tuesday morning that week was the kind of cold I had previously not thought possible for March unless you lived in Siberia. It was the type of cold that drew a gasp out of your lungs when you set foot outside, and even safely indoors if you happened to have been switching your heating off overnight of late in the optimistic hopes it was no longer needed, you would soon regret your not getting in bed with a snow-suit on.

All this to say, when I awoke mostly out of the bedsheets and confronted with the elements, I squirmed back into them in violent discomfort until nothing but my head remained exposed to the chill of Francis’ room. When I heard Francis toss around and pull level with me I made no move to protect myself even once he grabbed seemingly blindly for my shirt. I was too cold and too far from awake to resist his slinging an arm over my waist and burrowing into my side.

For as cold as Francis could run, his knack for claiming every inch of bedding to himself made him an incredible source of heat in bed. Lulled into newfound comfort, I fell back asleep for another good half hour.

When I woke up again Francis had migrated into a lounging position against the headboard but gallantly kept me pinned at his hip with a leg slung over me. When I made a move to pull upright he kicked me in the side. I glanced upwards and found him hidden behind a paperback Keats folio, his hair in disarray and the covers pulled up his chest like a housewife in an old sitcom.

Even a year and a half into my living in Montreal, this sort of domestic lie-in wasn’t par for the course. Sleeping together had become an accidental habit given our sleeping together, but in the mornings after I usually found my way back to my room as soon as I was compus mentis. I didn’t think about it consciously, but there was a pit in my stomach that still opened up when I saw myself in situations like these. The sex I could somehow shrug off now, which was its own questionable state of affairs, and lounging around the rest of the house felt more forgivable, like some continuation of our puppyish antics as college friends. This kind of intimate set-up made me feel claustrophobic in a more pressing way, imagining anyone I knew walking in and catching me in the act of homosexual idyl.

Some months prior I had woken up one morning and caught myself feeling held, in what I knew distinctly to be a man’s arms. I had felt sick with discomfort for weeks afterwards.

This all sounds very psychosexual, but there were good reasons keeping us from blurring boundaries any further. There was, for instance, the discomfort of inevitably remembering the women who I’d once shared this kind of closeness with, girlfriends and lovers, Sophie most lastingly. I had always been good at the little gestures women liked from men, bringing in coffees and indulgently allowing post-coital cuddles and morning kisses to the top of tousled hair. Placing Francis in this context felt unnatural, like rewriting biological code, even without his ever indicating any interest in this sort of middle-America romance.

As I lay there stewing, Francis lowered his book and looked at me with a distant sort of affront.

“I can see my breath.”

I couldn’t even argue with him, seeing as I could too. “So turn the heat back on.”

“Ad praesens ova cras pullis sunt meliora ad quem ad quod,” Francis said, and slid further down the headboard. “I’m not getting out of bed.”

I made a reluctant but vaguely relieved move out of my nest, wincing against the steep drop in temperature as I sought the radiator out. It rattled to life as I stood and shivered beside it.

“Thank you,” Francis said, courteously, and then clicked his fingers urgently. “Now get back here.”

“The room’ll be warm in a second,” I said. Francis shot me a look so disbelieving I found myself crossing over to the bed and getting resignedly back under the covers, lying flat on my back.

“Do you have classes this morning?”

“No. I figured I’d go in this afternoon to do some course planning.”

A pen and notebook appeared above me. “Here. Do some writing so you don’t start to brood.”

“I’m still waking up,” I defended, half-heartedly, but I took both and wriggled upwards. Francis had vanished behind Keats again, which was obliquely reassuring, albeit in a way that made me feel pathetic.

Putting pen to paper helped take my mind off things. I wrote some aimless notes at first, vague shorthand references to things I had already explored in my writing. But lying in on a cold morning had made my mind wander back to a memory I didn’t sit with so often those days, and I found myself writing of myself in Hampden over that awful Christmas break, the drafty ceiling and my stubborn ignorance, sickness and Henry. From the vantage point of my thirties I looked like an idiot kid putting myself in danger out of pride and insecurity, but Henry’s rescue still hit me the same way beneath the ribs, a beatific light drowning out the embarrassment of his having to save me from myself.

I don’t know that I wrote especially well that morning, but I was in a good writing mood, and passed an hour playing around with the scenes in my mind. When Francis eventually dropped his book to his bedside table with a sigh, snapping me out of my focus, I looked down at the last line I’d penned- Winter is as Winter does- and hastily snapped the notebook shut lest eagle-eyed bedmates comment on how dangerously near poetry I was veering.

“I guess we had better leave the room at some point,” Francis said, a touch morosely, and stretched like a cat, arms all angles as he raised them aloft. “It’s getting to that time.”

I glanced at the clock; it was nearing lunchtime. “You have something on today?”

“Did I forget to say?” Francis wondered, glancing down over his shoulder. “I thought I had. Anyway yes- work, actually. I’m going to some talk. JP invited me.”

“I don’t think you’d mentioned that,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed and stretching too. “When are you going?”

“I think it starts at three, but I’ll probably grab lunch with him first. And there might be some hanging around afterwards. You know how these things go.”

I nodded, running a hand through my sleep-flattened hair. Watching Francis adroitly slide his watch back on his bad wrist I felt one of those passing inclinations to do something affectionate to him, but even as the urge materialized I knew I wouldn’t- I was only capable of these actions when they were entirely spontaneous, and it was too late for that now. But when Francis stood he smiled a little like he could glean something from my face, and I managed a smile back before I took my leave.

I got dressed while trying to shake off the slightly forlorn mood threatening to settle over me. I was more commonly the one with places to be and people to see between us, but for all that Francis had less to do with himself and still went through spats of intense agoraphobia, he retained something of the socialite in him. He had managed to build a circle of acquaintances I would never have dreamt of his having when he’d first decamped to Montreal, and I only chafed a little at the hours he spent mingling with them. It wasn’t that I was jealous of his time- if anything, it was usually a relief to be left alone for a while- but there was some old insecurity there, dating back to our Hampden days, learning too late what I’d been kept out of. Sometimes I wished Francis would extend the invitation instead of swanning off on days where I had nothing better to do than mope around like a jilted girlfriend.

I didn’t say a word of this to Francis, of course, which I justified to myself as a matter of not spooking him when he’d made such progress putting himself out there. That was the crux of it, really, these social occasions being part of Francis’ work. Over the past year it had become apparent to me that the bulk of Francis’ working was really networking, and what’s worse that he seemed to be very good at it. I was no slouch at rubbing elbows myself, but he had the advantage of the silver spoon.

Once Francis had rushed off, late as always, I willed the hours away doing some writing and took myself for a walk around the quartier, but it was still so damn cold I didn’t get far before I started hurrying back to the apartment. As I fought against the bite of the wintry winds, I pictured Francis comfortably drinking wine in some guy’s downtown loft, probably holding court with people who found him charming. I successfully distracted myself from the bad weather working up to a righteous tangent about his having to start contributing more to bills since he had so much free time to waste on bourgeois house-parties every other week, but this satisfaction was undercut by my remembering the whole apartment was Francis’ to begin with, and also that even in the privacy of my own head I sounded like the kind of bum boyfriend Sophie’s friends had always mocked.

I wound up listlessly eating leftovers in front of the TV, thinking about nights like these when I’d been with Sophie and trying to remember how I’d gotten over myself then. It was queer to feel so alone just being left to my own devices for a few hours. It wasn’t like I didn’t know people who I could go for a drink with, colleagues and neighbors; I was aware if I just picked up the phone I’d manage perfectly well to find something to do and get past this teenaged brooding. But doing so would have felt like conceding defeat in some way. I had lived on my own for years, after the final breakup with Sophie, socialized and hooked up but usually returned to my empty apartment, and it had been pretty much fine. In fact, Francis going off on his little excursions was also pretty much fine, normally. I didn’t know why this particular absence was rubbing me up the wrong way so much, and I didn’t like the way I was behaving myself.

In protest, I retreated to my room early and kept my door firmly shut through Francis’ eventual return. I didn’t want to feel like a dog sat waiting for the lock to turn.

WEDNESDAY

Montreal had warmed several degrees on Wednesday morning, and with the windchill reduced I was heartened enough to trek out to campus mid-morning, hoping to shake off the slight stir-craziness of the day prior.

I was not alone in gambling on the first glimmers of spring; the city was bustling with families and students chattering away as they headed I don’t know where. I stopped by a coffee shop near the university and watched the other clients as my purple-haired barista tended to my drink. At the table nearest to me two guys about my age were engaged in a heated discussion about the Canadiens having moved from the Forum to the Molson Centre, one arguing it was good to keep up with the Americans and scale up, the other decrying the loss of hockey heritage and the commercialization of the sport. Neither touched on what I felt to be the most pertinent issue, this being that Molson was a disgusting beer.

By the time I had left the coffeeshop, the guys had moved on to talking about Braveheart’s chances at the Oscars. I had seen the film in cinemas with Marie-Claire and a few historian colleagues, and enjoyed the post-watch tear-down more than the movie. Francis, who had heard some of the controversy second hand, had cracked up a few weeks later showing me an article he’d come across in the papers. Mel Gibson, for some reason or other defending himself against accusations of homophobia, had randomly pointed to Alexander the Great as a historical homosexual worth his salt. Quoth Francis, we had better pray for poor Alexander, lest we next see him on screen in lederhosen as portrayed by Tom Cruise.

Olivier had a Marxist seminar on Wednesday mornings, and my other colleagues were teaching, so I had the office to myself for a few hours, sparing me the distraction of working in the library. Faced with the opportunity, I could not put off grading papers any longer, for all that I dreaded the task. It wasn’t that the students were all incompetents, but even the best of them were freshly engaging with the texts and questions put to them, so that I always felt sort of exasperated raising the same kind of points in response. I wondered often if Julian had felt the same during our classes, although I instinctively rebelled against the idea.

Most of the papers this time around weren’t so bad, which tended to be the case in Spring semester. I finished up within a reasonable time and headed home in a better mood, which lasted only as long as it took me to pick up our mail.

I always felt Francis and I got an absurd amount of mail for two people whose location was still semi-secret to most of their acquaintances. No family knew of my whereabouts, I didn’t keep in touch with my L.A. friends and colleagues, and Camilla only rarely called or wrote. Some of Francis’ family had some inkling of his being in Canada, but no one who would reach out (or, as Francis had feared for some time, hunt him down). He was not interested in hearing from his Boston friends either, for all he complained of being reduced to a monastic lifestyle. All in all it was really only those people we knew in Montreal plus occasionally Camilla and Olivia Abernathy we could expect correspondence from. Even so, our fires stayed lit courtesy of the university, my publishers, local newsletters, hordes of unwanted advertising, and, of course, still less wanted bills.

It was upon opening one of said bills that my mood took a sharp downward plunge. I entered the apartment still staring at the paper.

“Francis?”

He was in the living room, and obviously clocked the situation as soon as I walked in. I watched him consider playing dumb before recognizing the futility of this course of action, his arms crossing defensively.

“What is it?”

I thrust the phone bill at him wordlessly. Francis’ mouth pulled. I interrupted right as he was gearing up for some kind of Hail Mary.

“Well, it’s not-“

“One month. That’s one month. I’m asking you genuinely- how are you even running up these numbers?”

“It looks worse on paper,” Francis protested, flustered by my sangfroid. “You know I’ve had to talk to more people than usual because of the conference, and- people call me, too, what am I supposed to do, hang up?”

I pointed silently at the Call Duration column, which peaked at three hours. Francis reddened. I shook my head.

“I don’t know what to say that I haven’t said before. What’s the fix? Do I need to throw out the landline and monitor your access to my cell phone?”

Francis’ eyes narrowed. “Don’t patronize me, I’m not a child.”

“Then have some self-control, since you’re a grown man,” I retorted, annoyed. “Seriously, these are the kind of conversations people have with their teenaged daughters.”

“Thanks, dad,” Francis drawled, resorting next to his usual line of argument. “But I pay the phone bill, so be nice and please don’t ground me, will you?”

I let out a frustrated breath. “And if you didn’t run it up like crazy, we could use the money for other things. Like any of the things you keep going on about not having.”

Francis’ brows furrowed; before he could try a further comeback or- unlikely- concede the point, the phone rang.

We stared at one another; when the phone continued ringing Francis squirmed. I stood there like stone until he cracked and hurried over to pick up, shoulders tight with self-consciousness.

“Hello?”

A pause, then a slow turn my way. “Yes, he’s here.”

I gave him a nonplussed look; Francis made a show of extending the handset to me. “It’s your friend Judy.”

A hot flush of vexation went through me, and I grabbed the phone without looking at him, cursing Judy for her timing and Francis for his unreasonable smugness, like my getting a single call out of the blue somehow undermined the argument we’d had a thousand times over. “Hello?”

“Hi, Richard,” Judy sing-tonged, dragging both words out. “It’s me.”

“Hi, Judy. What’s up?”

“What, I need a reason to call? For all I know you died in the winter months, it’s so fucking freezing where you live. I don’t know how you could have gone back to that after college. You know where I spent Christmas? In my pool. Well, actually, not my pool, Kim Basinger’s. Did I tell you she bought a house up the street from my place? Anyway she invited a bunch of people in the neighborhood to her Boxing Day party, it was crazy. I swear to God Richard Gere was there. And, ohmygod, I was talking to this girl who’s screwing Michael Keaton, and it turns out she used to date Cloke Rayburn. Isn’t that something?”

“Small world, I guess.”

“Sure, everybody knows everybody in L.A.” There was some background rummaging, the faint sound of tinny pop music. “Anyway, really I was calling with some news. It’s not so new now, mind you, but since you never call I forgot to tell you.”

“Sorry, I just get busy, you know…”

“I would if you ever told me anything,” Judy said, waspish, but she breezed past the offense before I could interject. “I guess you’re all wrapped up in your boyfriend. He didn’t seem too happy picking up, FYI. He’s not jealous, is he?”

Her suddenly airy tone suggested nothing would make her happier. I choked on a series of denials and wound up making a noncommittal noise in the hopes it would cover all bases. “Don’t worry about him. What was your news?”

“I’m gonna have a baby,” Judy announced, nonchalantly, and audibly smirked at the gaping on my end. “Bet you weren’t expecting that, huh? What can I say- it just sort of happened and I wasn’t going to keep it but then I was thinking, like, I do not want to be some old hag mom when I’m pushing forty. And it’ll be much easier to get my figure back if I do it now, y’know?”

“Congratulations,” I managed, still wooden with shock. Visions of a nu-Judy in diapers were making my head spin. “Jesus, Judy. That’s huge. And the dad, is he…?”

“Mike? No, he’s old news,” Judy dismissed with a snort, saving me having to remember her previous boyfriend’s name. “Carlos and I have been together since, mm, September? So it’ll be basically a year by the time the baby’s born. We’re telling my parents it was longer, obviously. His parents are probably going to wig about us not being married, but they’re Latino, so he says they’ll get over it once there’s a grandkid in the picture.”

“Yeah, they’re big on kids,” I said, senselessly. Francis was still milling about in the living room, obviously eavesdropping, and I was struck by the urge to start mouthing at him like this was news to share. “Wow. Do you know what…?”

“No, but I’m working on names. We’re thinking Diego or Cosmo if he’s a boy, Luna or Demi if it’s a girl. I don’t want to go too old-school, but nothing crazy like all the new age babies we get around here. You know Sarah Patterson from Hampden? She married some music exec and got knocked up last year and they called their kid Savannah Storm. I mean, hello, Savannah Storm. Might as well put the kid in therapy now.”

We didn’t talk much longer; Judy was in a rush to go somewhere or other, and said her effusive goodbyes amidst somehow managing to get me to agree to meeting the baby down the line. I hung up in a daze, picturing Judy doing her hair on a treadmill with a baby bouncing on her lycra-clad hip.

“What was that all about?” Francis asked, from his put-upon casual examination of our bookshelf. I shook my head mutely.

“Judy Poovey. She’s knocked up.”

Francis swung around, rapt. “What? You’re joking.”

“Her and her Latin lover,” I recited, feeling myself start to unthaw in the face of his naked interest. “Carlos.”

“You are joking,” Francis repeated, and crossed over to me, astonishment masking divertissement. “But the state of that girl! Surely that’s too hostile a host for new life.”

“I assume she’s given up the drugs given her being knocked up,” I said, half-heartedly. “We’ve been invited to meet the baby, by the way.”

“Like hell,” said Francis, feelingly, which made me laugh. “Can you imagine? I’m no friend of children as it is.”

“I remember. At the Corcoran’s.”

Francis shuddered exaggeratedly. “Right, I forgot about those aberrations.”

“They weren’t all so bad,” I said, softened by nostalgia. “You never wanted kids?”

Francis gave me a pointed look. “I never saw them in my future, no.”

“Right,” I said, awkward, and averted my eyes. “But, when you thought you were going to get married…?”

“I wasn’t thinking that far ahead,” Francis smiled, humorlessly. “I guess it could have happened.”

“Okay, and?”

“And, and,” Francis repeated, dismissive, “I don’t know, and. I would have made a bad father, I imagine. Probably foisted the thing off on nannies and tried to keep my distance to avoid fucking it up too badly in the psychological department.”

This was a fair hypothesis; I nodded. Francis huffed, then gave me a considering look, withdrawing some. “And you? Picket fence, Golden Retriever, the whole thing?”

“No,” I retorted, piqued, but Francis was still looking at me expectantly, and I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. With the right person. It might- it might have- I mean it can be nice, having kids. Reading them books, and taking them places.”

I couldn’t make out the expression on Francis’ face, save that I felt closely scrutinized, and uncomfortable, unsure if I should steel myself for mockery. I pushed on. “I mean it doesn’t all have to be so cliché and dire.”

“Yes, I can see you as the modern paterfamilias,” said Francis, with a private smile, and slid his palm consideringly under mine, eyeing my empty ring-finger. “There is something about having it all down in ink somewhere. Mr and Mrs Papen, etc.”

“You almost had a Mrs Abernathy,” I said, deflecting a little, because I still wasn’t sure if I was being made fun of. Lined up Francis’ fingers were just about longer than mine.

“Not even my mother goes by that,” Francis scoffed, and laced our hands together suddenly, slight smile gone conspiratorial. “But I have gotten to know a fair share of married men.”

“Yeah, I bet,” I muttered, sort of hot under the collar. I remembered Francis in his wedding suit drunkenly eating cherries in a diner booth; my mind drifted to all manner of clandestine affair carried out hush hush as wedding pictures got guiltily turned away. “Weren’t you ever worried about getting caught?”

Francis made a chiding, offended noise. “Richard, I was the very picture of discretion.”

“I don’t believe you at all,” I said, boldly, and twisted our linked arms to draw him in. “You’re actually really reckless about this stuff.”

“It’s a fine line,” Francis huffed, slightly breathy; he’d staggered at my sudden movement, and was now bracing himself against me for balance, his hand resting on my shoulder in a girlish sort of way. “It takes a lot of practice to perfect.”

Hot prickling down my neck; I shot him a challenging look. “Oh, it does?”

“A lot,” Francis repeated, unrepentant. He was grinning when I kissed him punishingly hard.

THURSDAY

The classes I taught on Thursday mornings were particularly poorly attended. Wednesday nights were big for several of the local clubs, as was apparent in the distinctly hungover students who did bother showing up; once or twice I had actually shown up to empty classrooms, but I was rarely so lucky, and usually had to soldier on through my usual lesson plan while a handful of bleary-eyed Classicists stared at me despondently.

On this particular Thursday I had managed to retain a grand total of four students, of which three obviously hadn’t been asked out drinking with their peers to begin with- one a conservative crackpot from a deeply Catholic family, one an exchange student from China whose social integration left to be desired, and one wiseass who I inferred had been banished from the in-group due to fallout from unspecified romantic entanglements with classmates of both genders.

The four of us struggled through a passage from Crito together; I exerted more energy deflecting interruptions and defusing confrontations than explaining Socrates. William, bravefaced through his hangover, could offer only barebones insight. ‘Stacy’, real name Mei Zhang, managed to answer two whole questions coherently before stammering into silence when I attempted to elicit a follow-up discussion. Anne-France, who always took Thursday mornings as an opportunity to proselytize, had to be talked down from several unwarranted comparisons between Socrates and Christ accepting his crucifixion; Alys riposted by querying whether Socrates wasn’t then ‘nobler than Jesus’ given he had no divine lineage to fall back upon in accepting his fate.

After class I stopped by my office, and crossed Josiane on her way to a lecture. I liked Josiane, who was the calmest and most attractive of the colleagues I shared an office with, and so lingered to chit-chat with her in the hallway; she caught me up on the latest in the one-sided war between Marie-Claire and Olivier and gave me her copy of the Gazette to peruse on the condition I left it in the office so she could finish the crossword.

 I elbowed past Olivier to put my things away, then perched against a shelf to flip through the newspaper. I’d missed the initial coverage of the Dunblane shooting the week prior, but it was in the news again because of some gesture Jean Chrétien’s government had made. I stared for a while at the picture of the poor kids in their little uniforms, which felt obscurely ghoulish, then skimmed through the headlines- national debt, hockey, separatists, the usual.

A shrill ringtone broke the stuffy quiet, causing Olivier to startle like I’d pulled a gun on him; it was the office phone, currently being used as a paperweight atop a precarious stack of papers. Momentarily overcoming his cartoonish ineptitude, Olivier grappled for the handset, and answered the phone in the hushed tones of a wanted fugitive.

“Bonjour?”

A beat, then an owlish, suspicious look my way. “Non. Mais y’est là.”

He extended the handset without getting up from his seat. “C’est pour toi.”

“Merci,” I said, flatly, and took the phone from him, reclaiming my perch. “Bonjour? C’est Richard.”

“Don’t start on me about the phone thing,” Francis pre-empted, without further greeting. “I only wanted to ask if you wanted to go for lunch.”

“I do, but it’ll have to be someplace cheap,” I said, hearing myself say the words begrudgingly- I took no pleasure from being the buzzkill, but our phone bill was still haunting my dreams.

“I figured you’d say that, so I’ve made lunch,” Francis said, evidently in an easy mood. “Nice having a housewife, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed, nervously glancing at Olivier in case he’d overheard, which had the effect of making our conversation feel all the more louche. “I should be about half an hour getting there.”

“I’ll keep the fires burning,” Francis promised, enjoying himself with it. I rolled my eyes as much at him as at my own self-conscious reaction.

“See you in a bit.”

“Ciao.”

I put the handset back atop the leaning tower of Saint Petersburg as I grabbed my coat, adding unnecessarily for Olivier’s benefit: “Flatmate.”

In the ringing silence that followed, I decided that the next time I might as well go for ‘college classmate cum murder accomplice cum homosexual lover’ and see how that went over.

Lunch was pasta with roasted eggplant and generous servings of parmesan. I complained about my students for Francis’ entertainment before letting him have a go at the old man who lived two apartments down, whose latest offense was increasingly terrible parking due to what Francis and I both suspected to be less of a need for glasses than total visual impairment.

“I don’t think they ought to be allowed to drive at that age,” Francis concluded pitilessly. “I don’t see why they even need to live with the rest of us, really. Surely it’s safer for all involved parties if they’re stashed in a home somewhere they can pop pills and argue over bingo all day.”

“You’re getting really Spartan with age,” I observed, amused. “Cull the elderly and the infirm…”

“No, no, I said put them in a home somewhere,” Francis insisted, hotly. “Γλῶτταν ἴσχε! Athens till I die, I won’t stand for mischaracterization.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about anyone mistaking you for a product of the agoge.”

Francis looked mildly ruffled, although he didn’t protest the assessment. “I don’t see anyone taking to that very well nowadays. Although Henry would have jumped at the chance to hear him tell it.”

I could see the romantic picture of it, little Henry the zealot paidiskos, but suspension of belief only stretched so far. “With his eyesight? No shot.”

“And the migraines, and the attitude,” Francis conceded, with a snort. “Not to mention his total failure at operating within any kind of rigid schooling structure. Nevermind that then.”

Francis hadn’t read the news, but he’d picked up a fashion magazine from somewhere which he presented to me in order to get my opinion as to the newest Alexander McQueen show, which had apparently created a furore in the high fashion world, as well as attracting the ire of various religious groups accusing the designer of everything from poor taste to Satanism.

“It’s sort of advanced for me,” I assessed, dubiously looking over the photos of models whose breasts were out but whose faces were entirely covered in lace. “High fashion, I mean. I don’t get who it’s for.”

“Well, it’s not especially wearable, I’ll give you that,” Francis said, and pointed at Kate Moss, who I barely recognized. “The makeup is terrible, too. I don’t know why they have to make the women so ugly.”

“And the religious thing is over-done at this point, isn’t it?”

“Beyond. But there is something titillating about it when it’s not over the top. I like the mask on the Black girl. And the one all in black lace is sort of chic.”

I would have said erotic, but then I had sex with women. I found myself disbelieving not for the first time that Francis could look at all those half-naked bodies without a hint of interest, though I did not voice this thought.

“You know it’s his first time doing menswear? I think it shows. Besides the butch guy in mesh it’s all sort of slapdash. I mean, why the hairnets?”

 “Welcome to McDonalds, would you like a slice of inferno….”

“And to call it Dante, as well. I must have missed the dominatrix unicorns in the original.”

Here I shrugged. “There is something to the name. A descent into madness, death. Ghouls all around.”

“Maybe so,” Francis said, considering, and rested his cheek against his palm to better scrutinize the spread anew, cigarette dangling forgotten between his fingers. “They do get some interesting faces for the high fashion things, don’t they? Not what you’d expect from a model.”

“I’ve been told that’s the difference between commercial and editorial,” I said, in self-deprecating tones, before nabbing Francis’ cigarette. “Or that’s what Sophie said, anyway. Commercial is cornfed and editorial is sexy alien. Something like that.”

“The more you know,” Francis murmured, intrigued, and flipped this way and that in the magazine to confirm this theory. Fed, relaxed and enjoying my cigarette, I felt emboldened to say aloud the thought that had formed in my head.

“You could pretty much put on a furry coat and walk one of these weird runways yourself, you realize.”

Eyebrow raise through the ceiling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What I said. You’ve got an interesting face.”

“That’s a funny compliment,” Francis said, but he was smirking a little. I pulled on my cigarette and quashed the rush of nerves combatively.

“I’m speaking objectively. But I’ve always thought that.”

“You have,” Francis echoed, less teasing, still smiling. “I remember.”

I shrugged, like: there you have it. Francis reclaimed his cigarette. Nothing of note happened the rest of the day save for the old man almost running over a dog pulling out of his parking spot.

FRIDAY

On Friday morning, I checked my computer to find Lisa had e-mailed me a copy of the first chapter of my book full of annotations with the oblique suggestion that I have a go at incorporating some and get it back to her ASAP. Also, it had snowed overnight.

Despite the instinct to pack my bags and move to a tropical island, I was privately relieved for anything to do bar looking at what the editors had done to my writing, and so went to get the shovel and wrap myself into three layers of outerwear. There was no stirring from Francis’ room, still pitch black and dead silent as I gritted my teeth and saw myself outdoors.

I set to cleaning the stairs while musing vaguely that Sisyphus himself might not have coped with the endless cycle of winter in Quebec. My first winter in Montreal I’d nearly broken my neck on a weekly basis trying to scrape ice and snow off the stairs, and that had come after both Francis and I almost dying a dozen times before it occurred to me one of us needed to clean them. A year later, I’d brushed up on my technique, but the mental fortitude of the locals yet eluded me, and if I hadn’t lived through spring and summer myself I might not have believed they even existed anymore. Francis was no help when it came to anything outside- he’d made vague attempts at cleaning the stairs once or twice after dramatic fights, and done such a terrible job of it that I’d banned him from doing so again, which I was pretty sure was intentional ineptitude on his part.

I wasn’t suffering alone on the streets. Most of our neighbors had designated shovelers too, and given everyone had to clean fresh snow in the mornings I’d come to know a lot of them on a nodding and waving level. The majority of them were dads and boyfriends, but there were the odd few apartments where college kids or single women resided. Of the college kids, a group of guys living across the street were the least worn down by the whole thing- I never had an inkling how many of them actually lived in the apartment, but they travelled in packs of at least four or five at any given moment, and I suspected they were part of some kind of hockey program given their posturing antics and proclivity to turning the icy sidewalk into an impromptu rink some mornings, to the general ire of everyone else.

The apartment directly opposite ours housed two couples living on the two different floors, and it was the downstairs boyfriend I saw most often, a brown-haired man about my age who always gave me an affable nod from across the street. I knew from one or two mundane conversations that he was from Ottawa and that he and his slightly younger girlfriend spoke in English to one another, although she was Quebecois herself. They’d had a baby sometime in the New Year and I often wound up sympathetically watching them fight the elements with a stroller under one arm and the baby under the other, grocery bags abandoned in the quest to get the keys in the door.

The boyfriend was also shoveling the stairs that morning, and gave me a tired-looking nod which I returned. He was dressed in a suit beneath his snow clothes, and when he finished the top step the door opened, his girlfriend leaning out in her dressing gown to hand him his briefcase and kiss his cheek, the baby shrieking audibly indoors. I watched him walk down the street for a while, feeling a pang of something like jealousy. I had these moments on occasion where I caught myself sort of wishing I could step into his shoes, just put on a boxy suit and see myself to a nondescript high-rise, exchange office banter with other corporate types, and come home after work to my perfectly average girlfriend and our doubtless insufferable baby. It all just seemed so normal, and uncomplicated. Even the worst days were so by the book.

Of course, if I worked a corporate job, I’d probably have jumped in front of a train after a week, or gotten fired two days in. And the girlfriend wasn’t much of a looker. Not to mention I had decided long ago I could never vindicate my parents by settling for some middle-American dream. It was just a day-dream I wallowed in sometimes, part indulgence part self-abuse. I knew if Judy called one day and told me Sophie was married with kids I wouldn’t like to hear about it, for all that I had no real desire to be husband or father to her. But there was something instinctive about it, at the end of the day, or else humanity wouldn’t have carried on doing it for so long. As counter-culture as my circles ran, we were all of us getting older.

It was just a half-way fantasy, the outline of a future I had always vaguely left the door open to despite taking no steps to pursue it. With my current living situation I felt I was getting dangerously close to having those doors close on me. The only thing that was really keeping the dream alive was, ineluctably, Camilla.

With Camilla nothing was vague. I could see the picture clearly, as I had in every other stage of our lives; the scenery shifted, that was all. Her grandmother would die someday, and she would call to say she couldn’t keep the house, or she had nowhere else to go, no one to know, at least for a little while. Then she would show up at our doorstep, or at the airport, or I would catch her coming up the street from the metro, suitcase trailing behind her, pale eyes sleepily taking in the city, and I would go to her, and hold her to me, and follow wherever she led.

It was possible, this wild dream. Not, I knew, plausible. I remembered Camilla in Boston, the way she’d spoken to me, Francis’ cutting echoes of the same, in California. But while we both still lived anything was possible, and so the dream remained. Stranger things had happened to me.

Thinking of Camilla, her skinny arms around my neck in Boston, and the neighbor and his warm-bodied doughy girlfriend made me agitated. I returned indoors to shed my layers, face burning from the cold, and felt the prickling heat spread inexplicably to my gut.

I went uneasily to my room, stopping only to make myself a coffee to reheat my frigid hands. Back at my desk, I faced the music of Lisa’s email. The proposed edits weren’t so catastrophic, nothing too brutal save one or two instances I would put my foot down about, but I winced through them all anyway. Once I’d survived the first read-through I began to go through the suggestions one by one.

About a half hour into my editing, Francis’ door swung open, startling me. I listened to him make his way into the kitchen, the whirring of the coffee machine, the banging of the fridge door. It was obvious I was up, but he didn’t say anything. For some reason I felt compelled to abandon my desk and drift over, flexing my wrist from where I’d been digging it into the edge of the keyboard.

“Morning.”

Francis made a sound of acknowledgment. He was dressed down by his standards, in grey slacks and a soft, pale blue sweater that hung loosely around his shoulders, bare feet toeing the carpet and face tired.

“I cleaned the steps already,” I said, for something to say. “And Lisa’s sent me initial edits on the book.”

“Very good,” Francis replied, in tones that suggested I could have just told him I was fathering Judy’s baby and gotten the same amount of response. I felt my earlier restlessness, which work had not succeeded in quelling, flare up in me.

“Have you heard anything from- from the twins, lately?”

I had been about to mention the neighbors, from some impulse to use Francis to work through whatever feeling I was having, but I could tell I wasn’t about to get a nuanced and thoughtful comment out of him. This didn’t stop me from asking about the twins; I’d done too fine a job conjuring Camilla that morning and the image of her had been haunting me.

“Camilla? Not recently,” Francis said, blowing listlessly at his coffee before shooting me a vague, perplexed look. “But you wrote to her, in the new year, I thought.”

“Yeah, in January,” I started, then stopped, irked by the reminder. Camilla had called in response, and we’d talked then, but she hadn’t sent me a letter back.

I waited for him to say something, maybe question my transparent pining, but he only rubbed at his temples, hissing in complaint, and didn’t pick me up on anything. I felt humiliatingly low, too trivial to capture even the easily piqued curiosity of Francis Abernathy. Despite the severe protesting of my pride, my tongue untied itself for a last-ditch effort, now not at engaging in conversation but at least retaining some significance in the room.

“I’ve got to finish editing this chapter. Maybe you could have a look before it goes back to Lisa.”

“I really don’t know what I could tell you that an editor can’t,” Francis sighed, and then made matters worse by adding, sort of apologetically: “Anyway, you’re the author. You know what’s best.”

“Right,” I said, and promptly returned to my room, spitting mad and still as unsettled as I had felt all morning.

I didn’t know what I’d expected. On a different day, I might have found Francis more amenable to engaging in discussion, glancing over my writing, making me feel listened to in some capacity, I suppose. But none of this attention would have addressed my private discomposure, which although I could not make sense of as a coherent thought I knew with certainty Francis would have still less hope of understanding. I was, as always, the prisoner of my own idiosyncratic mind, and lonely for it.

I soldiered though the rest of the chapter, feeling increasingly resentful of the whole endeavor, and finally sent it back to Lisa with an e-mail that bordered passive-aggressiveness, kicking back my chair with grim satisfaction and prowling into the living room like I was wary of my computer hunting me down.

Francis was sat perched in the window-seat, forehead pressed to the window and book lying abandoned next to him, an ashtray balanced dangerously on his knee. At my approach he looked up and glanced at me up-and-down, which made me stop walking, conscious of my forceful pacing.

“Hello again.”

I mumbled some kind of greeting, turning aimlessly towards the couch, then making an abortive start towards the kitchen. Maybe I needed a walk to clear my head, but I couldn’t face getting myself back into my snow clothes and out into the cold again.

“Richard,” Francis called, like he’d done so before; I frowned his way reflexively.

“What?”

“What’s wrong with you today?”

“What?” I repeated, then grimaced at how stupid I sounded. “Nothing.”

“Well, obviously something.”

“Nothing,” I retorted. I never acted so superior when Francis was having his various episodes. “I’ve just sent off my chapter to Lisa, I’ve been working all morning, and I had to clean the goddamn stairs because it’s still snowing, I’m just- it doesn’t matter.”

“You seem worked up about something,” Francis said, through a mouthful of smoke, impassive. “What is it?”

 I hesitated; his brow wrinkled. “Was it something I did?”

“Not everything is about you,” I said, but it lacked bite. It was somewhat of a relief to have him asking questions after all.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed, finally, and folded my arms. “I don’t know how to explain it, anyway, it won’t make any sense to you. I just think, sometimes- nothing in my life’s gone the way it was supposed to. And- if I don’t watch out, I won’t have any chance to get it back on track, or- something.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t know what that’s like at all,” Francis said, sarcastically, but his eyes flicked to the window, which made me tense. “So you’re feeling trapped? Unrealized?”

“No, it’s not anything so concrete as that. I just don’t… I told you it doesn’t make sense. I have these moments where I think, maybe, the- the choices I’m making, the path I’m on, it means I’m not what I’m supposed to be.”

“Well, you know what the Greeks thought about choice,” Francis opined, in sensible tones. “Fatum is ineluctable, and all that.”

Trust Francis to choose the path of least self-governance. I shook my head, that feverish feeling stirring inside me. “Forget it.”

Francis was tapping his cigarette out into the ashtray, and he sighed a little. “Richard, come here.”

I did, dubiously. “What?”

“No, here,” said Francis, and when I was within arm’s reach pushed book and ashtray both to the side, fixing both hands on my hips. My hackles rose in time with my shoulders.

“Francis, this isn’t-“

“I think it is a little,” Francis said, matter-of factly. He moved one of his hands away, beckoning, and in spite of my resistance I bent down, for lack of a real reason not to. Inside my chest the keyed-up feeling was making my pulse pound, but it wasn’t desire, something more anxious taking shape.

I had expected, I realized, to be angry, faced with him. Resentful, at least. I wasn’t so incapable of self-reflection as to miss the surface-level interpretation of my weird angst. On some level it was the traditional I grasped at, and whatever fucked up thing I had going with Francis marked me pretty definitively as other, pulled those doors ever closer to shut. There was blame to be assigned, and I had plenty of experience blaming Francis for making me do all sorts of things.

I wasn’t angry, though. Closer to scared, but of some sick thing within my mind, not the tired crisis I’d had at the start of our tryst. When I leant down, Francis palmed my cheek, unambiguously affectionate, and I wilted, still edgy.

“I’m freaking myself out with whatever this is.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that,” Francis said, not without sympathy. “But this part I can manage.”

“I don’t even know what this part is,” I said, trying for a laugh. I did feel fairly ridiculous. Francis hummed, kneeled to face me so we were of a height.

“Luckily, no one needs to. Now come on, we’ll give the neighbors a show, too.”

This time I did laugh, aghast, and let myself slide down to the window-seat anyway, Francis’ sharp hip-bones under my hands for balance.

In the evening, I went on a two hour walk despite the snow, jittery in a different, more familiar way, head hot with the sense that that there were roles which ought to exist and which were continuously blurring into meaninglessness between Francis and I.

When I returned, cold and worn down, Francis flicked me a look and said nothing at all.

SATURDAY

On Saturday morning, I contended with a diplomatic email from Lisa regarding some pointed comments from the editor in response to my amendments. After some consideration and much private irritation I wrote back a sunny email of which the underlying intimation was that the editor was possibly an illiterate rube and that his suggested streamlining would contradict the purpose of the Delphic maxim passage right before it. In truth Lisa had assured me the editors chosen to work on texts like mine had all the relevant qualifications to do so, so it wasn’t really a linguistic error on his part, just a difference in taste, but I was counting on Lisa’s own total indifference to anything Greek to make her believe me at face value and take a hard line with the editors without my having to make any further plea.

It occurred to me that, down the line, should I be confronted with any trickier stand-offs with the editors, it might be helpful to deploy Francis as a trump card: I’ve had a translator look at it, and…

I switched off the computer and stretched. Francis, who had been lingering bored all morning, appeared in my doorframe as if summoned.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“The weather’s nice today,” Francis said, with an eager nod of the head towards the street. “I thought I’d go walk around Place des Arts, see if anything’s showing.”

And he wanted company, because he still hated being left to do anything in silence. I glanced at my desk, found nothing that especially needed doing except some class planning that I had no intention of doing until Sunday night anyway.

“Sure, I can come with.”

“Oh, if you want,” Francis said, off-handed, and disappeared with a skip in his step.

I ate a quick lunch, leftovers from dinner I hadn’t gotten around to the day prior, and when I’d finished rinsing dishes Francis reappeared already bundled in his coat and scarf, palming his keys impatiently. I bit back an amused smile and went to get my own things, wondering when, if ever, I could expect Francis to age out of his bouts of shameless enthusiasm for whatever caught his interest. It was probably the aspect of his personality I found most endearing.

Francis paced around fluffing pillows and straightening book piles while I sat on the couch getting my boots on, clicking his tongue when a cloud of dust rose from a particularly over-stuffed shelf he was messing around with.

“I really need to dust sometime.”

“I’m not doing it for you again,” I warned, without looking up. Francis waved a dismissive hand my way.

“I’ll get to it, calm down. We’re not where we were this time last year.”

“Yeah, you’ve figured out how to hold a broom,” I replied, through a grin, Francis huffing in mild embarrassment.

“You’re no Suzy Homemaker yourself.”

“Uh huh,” I returned, and grabbed Francis’ hand to pull myself up, Francis yelping and swaying before he righted himself. “Look at these. Never did a day’s honest work in your life.”

“You’re an academic,” Francis retorted, acerbic, but he was trying not to smile either, self-consciously.

We set off into the city in step. Francis had spoken true: it was a nice enough day, sludge aside, and people were milling about, going places. As Francis monologued for his own enjoyment about some minor grievance or other to do with his coat, I reflected that, amidst all of the wild developments of the previous year and spare of our cohabitation, I really hadn’t foreseen how easy it would become to flirt with him. It was like a bizarre extension of our usual bantering and bickering. For the most part I enjoyed it, somewhat guiltily.

As we walked past the Plateau, my eyes landed on a very glamorous older woman, and I turned to Francis, remembering.

“Your mom’s birthday is coming up, isn’t it?”

“Yes, two weeks,” Francis said, automatic, and frowned at his scarf. “I’ve still not decided what to get her.”

Olivia Abernathy’s birthday the previous year had been a fraught time for Francis, who had realized only belatedly he would not be able to indulgently provide his mother with his usual roster of gift deliveries, nor attend the usual lavish party she threw around the date (which, I had previously been told, was never allowed to be called a birthday party, because Olivia was the sort of woman whose real age was unknown to everyone bar her parents, Francis included- although, he had told me, he had simply done the math growing up, given his grandmother had more than once reminded her daughter severely of the age at which she’d had him).

It had been unpleasant for both of us, not just because of Francis’ mood. I had sympathy for his moping, and for his mother, whom I remained very fond of. Although I’d never said a word of it to Francis lest I have to hang myself from embarrassment, I’d felt for a few days very much how I expected the poor husbands of runaway noblewomen might have felt back in the olden days, faced with their wilting English roses and their own inability to provide them with the riches they were used to.

Our budget was not much improved, and Francis’ relationship with his mother remained in an uncomfortable place, in part because his grandparents had made clear that too much contact with their estranged grandson threatened her inheritance too. I wondered what I would have done in his shoes. I hadn’t spoken to my own mother since college, and I didn’t like thinking of her, nor my fears that either she or my father had died and left the other alone and aged in the yellowing house I’d grown up in.

“It is pathetic, really,” Francis sighed, kicking at a branch. “To be so dependent on money. It’s all so vulgar until you don’t have any.”

“You still have more than lots of people,” I replied, although really I was quite impressed by his self-awareness. Francis made a face.

“You already know I’m an ingrate. Let me feel sorry for myself, or no one else will.”

“Aw, Francois,” I snorted, and knocked my shoulder lightly into his. “I feel sorry for you. You could have a better flatmate, at least.”

“Don’t fish for compliments,” Francis retorted, shaking his head. “You’ve been too handsome too long to play coy.”

We reached Place des Arts in good time, and milled about window-shopping for a bit, eventually ducking into a bar for a drink and a smoke. I had a drunken bridal party in my line of sight, and dutifully reported their fascinating conversation to Francis by way of the telephone game, keeping us entertained for a good while.

“You never got that serious, with Sophie?” Francis asked, at some point, regarding the bride-to-be. I shook my head. “You dated for a while, I thought.”

“It didn’t feel right,” I settled on, not defensive exactly but not keen to retread our whole relationship. “And we were younger, I wasn’t making great money. I don’t know. I was happy enough. I guess probably I shouldn’t have let it get so serious with anyone I couldn’t tell about- you know.”

“Right,” Francis said, clipped. “To be honest, I don’t think I was ever tempted.”

“I mean, me neither, not seriously. You never felt like it was this massive wall between you, though, keeping a secret like that?”

“No,” Francis said, and smiled obliquely. “Secrets tend to be the name of the game where my dating life’s concerned.”

Despite his tone this struck me as sad, although I supposed I had a similar affliction. I was always lying about some part of myself to the people I wanted to like me. “Sounds tricky to keep track of.”

“Not really. It’s harder to be honest. There’s much more at risk.”

“At least you don’t have to bother for my sake.”

Francis’ eyes flicked up. “What do they say, honor amongst thieves? Truth between liars. I don’t know how much that’s worth.”

“It’s something,” I said, subdued.

“You know,” Francis said, changing the subject, “I was in the library the other day, and they have that movie, Before Sunset, or whatever it’s called. It has the actor from Dead Poets Society, the new boy. It made me think about that scene, where he gets a second desk set for his birthday he didn’t want the first time around.”

“Sure.”

Francis toyed with his wineglass. “It’s funny, it just made me think. When I was really young, I mean a kid, for a few years, everyone around me pretended my mother was my sister. She ran off for six months at some point, I think my grandparents were worried she’d disappear and cause me to have some kind of psychological episode, so they had me call them my parents for a while, and when she was home she’d be my sister, I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, for however long that lasted, I got all sorts of handmedowns- I don’t mean her stuff exactly, more like her violin tutor and her desk and we took the same kind of family pictures by the beach. The way some parents are when they messed up with the first child, you know what I mean. Afterwards things kind of changed again, but I remember really feeling like a do-over for a while.”

We left the bar and ambled to the Quartier des Spectacles. The Cirque du Soleil had a new show on, and some unlucky performers had come to do advertising for it in the cold, a tiny stage set up in the middle of the square. We huddled to watch the white-clad acrobats perform absurd feats of athleticism to overloud music and smatterings of applause from the audience- it was still too chilly for a big crowd to form, and after watching the act for a few minutes I dragged Francis with me to the nearest bar so I could drink and get warm again, blithely ignoring his Bostonian superiority vis a vis the temperature.

The bar I’d chosen on a whim was a different atmosphere from the first one, smaller and more intimate, the kind where you could hear the next table over’s conversation. I sat us at an isolated table in the corner as a protective measure. For two such fine liars and deceivers, Francis and I had a habit of getting invested in conversation, forgetting our surroundings, and attracting weird looks from people around us as a result. We had gotten noticeably worse about it since we’d started living together, and I suspected my manners in general were suffering from our prolonged cohabitation.

As we drank and palavered, I did my usual people watching, sweeping from one side of the bar to the other. There were the regulars- read alcoholics- at the bar, already losing their drunkard’s charm by this time of the afternoon. College students, starting the drinking early in preparation for a big night out. Coworkers, or a couple, or coworkers having an affair, hushed over glasses of wine. A group of middle-aged men chatting up the lone waitress. Also, two men slightly older than me stood in the opposite corner still wearing their coats and speaking with their heads together.

My gaze paused on these two, lingering while I tried to place them. At first I tried to guess at something to be spoken of privately, bad news, or something, but they didn’t seem somber, or stressed. Eventually one of them laughed and went back to the bar, hand brushing the other man’s arm as he went, and the remaining man, in a green coat, smiled to himself in an unmistakably pleased way. A couple, then.

I felt myself tense a little, suddenly too aware of myself. If one of the bar’s other patrons was sat carrying out my own habitual exercise, what did they think of our table? Tucked away in a corner, several drinks deep, sat probably too close together, and Francis looking like he did, legs crossed at the knee, a little out of place in his style of dress. Most likely they were making the same assessment of us.

In the first months of my move to Montreal, this kind of thought would have sent me into mental agonies, but time and possibly a lack of divine punishment had numbed the instinctive panic to a dull discomfort I could usually ignore. I shifted in my seat, glanced again at the man at the bar, and found myself wondering about a slightly different subject which it hadn’t previously occurred to me to ask Francis about outright.

While I had been people-watching, Francis had lit a cigarette, in flagrant breach of the no-smoking sign right above his head. His cheeks were lightly flushed, I guessed as much from the overheated bar as from our steady day-drinking. I took a gulp of wine and pushed past the dryness of my throat.

“Stop me if the question bothers you, but I guess I’ve always kind of wondered. What’s it like, trying to pick someone up, when it’s… You know, guys?”

Francis shrugged, not prohibitively. “What’s it like with girls?”

“Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Fine, but you know what I mean.”

A smile, sly and indulgent. “Sure. You see a girl you like, at a party, or a bar, I guess. Buy her a drink. Flirt a little.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

Francis rolled his eyes. “Of course, it’s all very easy for you.”

A pleased prickle of flattery made me take the bait. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know you and girls. Judy. And Sophie, too. That girl, I liked. Oh, he smiles, he reads books, Richard. He’s so hot.”

I smiled levelly. It wasn’t far off base. “Okay. Pot, kettle, a little.”

“Oh, no. You have never had me fooled. I know you.”

This was laughably untrue, and yet also not a lie.

“Sure. But it can’t be exactly the same, with guys.”

Francis shrugged in concession. “You have to be a bit more subtle sometimes. Do some….“ Fluttering hand movement. “...Reconnaissance, so you know you’re not likely to be running home with a cracked tooth and a bruised ego.”

“Makes sense,” I said, and wisely did not dig for what signs exactly one might look out for. “Sounds hard.”

“No, well. You learn from experience.”

“So you’ve put the feelers out, and then you just…?”

“You’re free to make your move. Keep it plausibly deniable.”

My turn to bait now. “Wear a red rose in your lapel.”

“You watch too many movies,” Francis said, exaggeratedly prissy. “It’s flirtation, what do you want me to say? It’s an art, not a science.”

“So definitely no grand coded gestures,” I pushed back, glancing at the man in the green coat, who had now been rejoined by his date. Francis hummed.

“Depends how hard you’re trying. Buy him a drink, at least. Get him away from people if you can.” His eyes flashed my way with mischief. “If he’s really cute, row him out on the lake.”

I grinned and looked away, too charmed not to look it. “Oh, sure, that one.”

“Results may vary for that method, I should say.”

Minutes later, the beleaguered waitress came to tell Francis that he really couldn’t be smoking inside, and she was technically supposed to be kicking him out. Francis, gentleman-like, offered to throw himself out so she could act like she’d done the deed, and so we left the bar to be confronted with the evening chill outside, making me shiver. I was not looking forward to the walk home.

There was a band playing in the Quartier now, and Francis stalled to listen to them while I shifted from foot to foot, tipsy but not drunk enough to be insulated from the cold. It’d been a while since I’d wasted away half a day drinking out, and I was sorely tempted to dive into the next available bar to finish what we’d started, but pecuniary considerations tempered the urge. I stood bargaining with myself until Francis turned around and pointed to our usual haunt on the next street over.

“Happy with that?”

“Extremely,” I said, folding immediately. Drinks were expensive, sure, but it wasn’t like the bank would be knocking on our door any time soon. If I skipped lunch a few days, which I tended to sporadically do anyway when holed up on campus, I’d feel like I’d recovered the costs and soothe any temporary anxieties.

We were on familiar terms with the bartender working that shift, and he and I made small talk as Francis pored over the drinks menu like he’d never been there before. It was getting late enough that everywhere was busy, and there were at least two or three people behind us we were holding up, judging by the impatient muttering that followed Francis finally smacking the menu down and ordering our drinks plus a bottle of the really quite decent house wine. When it came to paying, he fingered his coat open and withdrew a thin wad of bills from an envelope, sliding two fifties over to Pierre towards our tab.

“Where the hell did that come from?” I asked, mystified, as we wound our way over to a table. Francis squinted at me and shook his head.

“Just take your drink, Richard.”

A thousand possibilities flashed through my mind, each more fantastical and somehow more mentally taxing than the last. I decided with learned wisdom not to ask any follow-up questions, and soldiered bravely past caring.

“Extend my thanks to your wealthy lovers, then. I knew there was something between you and Mr. Bouchard.”

Francis, caught off guard, laughed loudly, then pressed a hand to his mouth and swatted at me with a cocktail stirrer.

Flush with Francis’ mysterious wealth, we spent the next few hours happily chatting up a storm in the increasingly rowdy bar, pressed in close across our table to hear each other over the noise and accumulating empty glasses. It was dark and we were several drinks too many down by the time we made it back outside, Francis gripping my arm for balance as he tried to light his cigarette one-handed. He managed it, bad wrist and all, as I dizzily dragged us down the street, trying not to get distracted and trip us both into a snowpile or a car.

I hadn’t drunk so much in what felt like forever, my vision gone blurry around the edges and my pace unsteady, and I felt wonderful for it, protected against the cold, happy in myself, my only real concern making sure Francis held onto the keys long enough to get us home. I was trying to reclaim them from him so he’d stop recklessly spinning them around his fingers, but Francis kept dodging me by flinging himself bodily sideways in the knowledge I’d have to save him from falling over first, and when in a breathless rush I finally hauled him back so strongly he slammed fully into me and I grabbed hold of his hand, he blew a mouthful of smoke into my face, cackling at my ensuing coughing fit.

“Jesus, Francis, my eyes!”

“Sorry!”

“No, you’re not!”

“No, I’m not!”

We calmed enough for me to concede defeat re: the keys, and for Francis to stash them safely in his pocket, reasonable all of a sudden, though I kept my grip on his arm for the next few streets anyway, as a safety precaution. Francis’ attention was everywhere but the sidewalk, flicking with passing curiosity between every person we crossed and random parts of our surroundings; mine, I will admit, was mostly on Francis, entertained by the rapid transformations of his face as we went along. This was probably the cause for my nearly dislocating a shoulder bumping into a streetlight, which ground us to a halt as I cursed and clutched my aching shoulder, which was definitely far less injured than it felt but would surely bruise.

“Ow,” I concluded, eventually, rubbing aggressively at my throbbing arm, and then had to close my mouth because Francis had slipped his cigarette between my lips, clucking sympathetically.

“Here, to warm you up. Your face is all red, you look like you’re freezing.”

“I don’t feel that cold,” I managed, garbled, but I took a drag all the same, and let my eyes flutter shut in enjoyment.

We were maybe a street away from the apartment, amusing ourselves by guessing the ages of the drivers of each parked car we encountered, when a woman sort of collided with Francis rounding a corner, exclaiming in surprise as they staggered apart.

“Hey, watch it!”

Francis, who tended towards a chivalry that was borderline chauvinistic when inebriated, made a great show of apologia, picking the woman’s bag up and dusting the melted snow off it before handing it back to her. “I’m so sorry, it was my mistake.”

The girl’s affronted air vanished, expression turning assessing, and I belatedly clocked her flashy makeup and skin-tight outfit, my eyes drawn down to her implausible heels. “Oh, that’s no problem, sweetie. Sorry if I yelled.”

“Forget about it, it’s forgiven,” Francis smiled, with disarming warmth, and stepped back to allow her past. “You have a nice night.”

I was blanking on the word hetaera (porna seemed dangerously decipherable), and did not manage to raise the alarm before the woman smiled back at Francis through her lashes. “We could have a nice night together, if you wanted.”

I watched in real time as it occurred to Francis he was being hit on by a prostitute, and very nearly passed out containing the burst of laughter that threatened to follow.

“That’s a very flattering offer, but I’m afraid I have to decline,” was what he managed to respond with, admirably composed. The prostitute, unfortunately, was not so easily deterred, and seemed if anything quite taken by his reluctance.

“Oh, don’t be shy. I’ll make it special for you, I promise.”

“I have no doubt of that, but I really couldn’t possibly.”

“I’m the best girl in town, you know.”

Francis cast his eyes to heaven helplessly. “Therein lies the problem, madam.”

It registered quickly, with a clued-in glance in my direction, and then the woman smiled broader still, dimpling. “Oh, well, that’s no problem at all, I get your sort all the time. I’ll cut you boys a discount.”

I turned away and buried my face in my hands, shoulders shaking, abandoning Francis to ineloquently sputter his way through several more minutes of ludicrous conversation until the lady of the night finally grew bored of toying with him and sauntered off to look for better targets. The minute she had gone, I burst into the kind of laughter that only comes from being drunk and having to not act it for a moment, and could not stop for air even as we high-tailed it back to the apartment, Francis in still-stunned apoplexy.

“I’m being serious, Richard, who or what has it out for me somewhere up there? Do I need to start going to church again? Do you hire these people to find me?”

“Stop it,” I protested, unable to climb our stairs for fear of falling off them with the way my head was spinning. “I can’t breathe.”

“And you are a sick man for it!” Francis admonished with nary a slur, rallying enough to march himself up to the door before inebriation made him wobble and nearly fall right back down them. I hopped up to push him upright mid-stumble, and he continued as if uninterrupted. “See if I spend my hard-earned money on you again anytime soon.”

“Sorry,” I dragged out, amidst rattling inhales. “Could have spent it better elsewhere tonight.”

This set us both off again, even moreso when there was the distinct sound of somebody slamming their shutters from the next building over.

“Fine, you sadist, I’m glad I amuse,” Francis rasped, trying for lofty but still flushed from laughing himself, mostly at me. “Oh, my God, what has gotten into you?”

“You should know.”

“Christ!”

I was no help whatsoever in his quest to get us indoors; having manfully managed to make it up the stairs, I was still so worn with laughter and alcohol I could barely stand upright, clutching the wall for support.

“You’re ridiculous,” Francis managed, dredging up some kind of composure, even swaying drunk and loose-limbed like he almost never was, fox eyes green slits of mirthfulness, his loose fist coming up to beat weakly at my chest. “Richard Papen. They must have loved you in Plano.”

“Yeah, you reckon?”

“Yeah,” Francis parroted back, an attempt at Californian so off-base it didn’t offend. “Shows what they know in Plano.”

The words escaped me unthinkingly, still light-headed and woozy. I didn’t really register that I’d said them until Francis’ eyes went huge and the keys scraped loudly against the door. I inhaled too obviously.

I love you. Jesus Christ. Had I really just gone and said that?

The real trouble was, I thought, through the ringing in my ears, that I couldn’t even muster up convincing shock. I diligently avoided thinking about it, but it certainly was not the first time the words had occurred to me over the course of the past year or so. Not that I was some kind of lovesick over Francis, but after several months of our living together the idea that my complex feelings for the man might have coalesced against my will into something more legitimate did, on occasion, enter my mind. How I felt about this frightening possibility was largely dependent on the day.

Grappling privately with the thought whenever it snuck up on me was one thing. Voicing it to Francis was a whole different beast. A few months prior he had had coffee with his Ontarian translator acquaintance, and returned satisfied with a Sappho translation he’d left on my desk punctuated with an uncharacteristically cutesy “:0 ?” post-it note for my review. The page was covered in scrawled corrections, but the translation they had eventually settled on was unorthodox, punchy.

I want to say something but shame

prevents me

Yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things

and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say,

shame would not hold down your eyes

but rather you would speak about what is just

There was something either ironic or revealing about Francis’ partiality to Sappho. I remembered all too clearly the first time the thought had dawned upon me, my first Christmas in Montreal, how close I’d come to spitting it out in a fit of courage, Francis’ spooked repudiation. How inexplicable our relationship was. On a daily basis it was Francis who was free with his affections, who amidst our own routines had no compunction treating me with the off-handed niceness of a boyfriend. Maybe it was written in my stars, that I should either encase myself in inelegant distance or else burn overhot with intensity in every aspect of my life; that I could never appreciate what I had without grasping ravenously for more, even when I didn’t know what that was.

Thus cursed by fate and a sickness of the brain, resignation forbid me from attempting to backtrack. Instead I stared at Francis, feeling both far too drunk and far too sober, and watched him register that I wasn’t going to offer him the decency of a denial. It was his turn attempt to rally himself, which he did far better than I had, exhaling on a dismissive laugh.

“Someone’s had one too many tonight.”

As it happened, Francis was right. Unfortunately for him, it made me uncommonly gutsy. “Francis.”

“Oh, please let’s not,” Francis muttered, but he was no less successful with the lock now than before, and as a matter of fact his hand was shaking, doubtless from the cold. “Don’t spoil a good night.”

“Would it?” I asked, the question honest enough. “Spoil it?”

“Richard...”

“Why?” I pushed, over my arrhythmic pulse, high on adrenaline. “I mean, you know, don’t you?”

“What, that you love me?” Francis retorted, scornful enough it made me blush with shame. But I’d known him too long for his acid remarks to cut me down entirely, and I pressed into the doorframe beside him, mulishly earnest.

“It’s not… But you do know, right?” I searched for words, landed somewhere off-target, teenaged tongue-tied. “You’re- probably the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“God,” Francis said, and put his face in his hands. “Don’t say- yes, I know that! But you must realize how desperately sad it is, for you to be stood there telling me that! And as for the other thing-“

“The other thing?”

“Of course I care- of course you matter to me,” Francis soldiered on, stammering like he rarely did, shoulders high with discomfort. “But that’s a whole different thing from when you stand there mooning at me.”

This stung; I shifted backwards. “Nice, Francis.”

“Don’t make me into the villain here,” Francis protested, hotly. “I’ve seen you in love. And I’m sure it’s all very exciting but that’s a mess neither of us can afford, especially not me.”

“What?” I blinked, rocked by his tone. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean it’s all very good for you, now that I’m what’s left, but you are, in fact, all I have left,” Francis stormed, in a rush, rattling at the door, “So you can’t- fuck this up because of some romantic idea you’re entertaining, all right?”

Some kind of understanding shot through me, and I stared at him as he finally managed to jam the key into the lock.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Oh, please,” Francis said, and shoved the door open, chest rising and falling rapidly. “Please. Let’s draw a line under this. It’ll pass.”

“It’s not like that,” I replied, voice hushed by the sense of something overwhelming brushing by me, too close for comfort. I understood, innately, what Francis was talking about, and did not understand my own certainty that he was wrong, only that it felt too threatening to examine myself. Thought was dangerous in a way action hadn’t been.

Sensing me quieten, Francis whirled around, drawing himself up to fix me entreatingly, missing persuasive by a margin. “It’s nice of you to say, really. But don’t think it means something it doesn’t.”

“Fine,” I said, hazily, and we stood there for a moment, over-close, as the risk-taker in me eyed our new parameters and came to a dangerous conclusion. When Francis broke eye contact to close the door behind me, I didn’t move, but when he withdrew I grabbed hold of his wrist, scar tissue rough under my cold-numbed fingers.

Francis didn’t resist when I leaned in, not even when I suspect it became rapidly apparent that I was continuing our argument through unorthodox means; on the contrary, after the initial startled jolt he kissed me back with vehemence, and we went knocking into the wall several times before I tripped over the shoe rack and we were forced to unlatch, reeling, with all the violence of the shipwrecked breaking the surface for the first time.

“Fine,” I repeated, stubborn like I wasn’t queasy with it. “It means what it means.”

“Just- stop saying things,” Francis forbade, mortified, and then set to ensuring this himself, in what was essentially a counter-productive move.

SUNDAY

On Sunday morning, I saw the neighbor across the street again as I went to pick up the newspaper from where the newsboys inevitably missed our doorstep, our eyes meeting as a horrible cacophony of noise rang out from a few streets over.

“Construction starting,” the neighbor called out, tilting his head the way of the ruckus. “Spring’s here, eh?”

“Looks like,” I agreed, and went back inside.