"Oh, you'll know this one. That scene of her on the subway grate, with her skirt blowing up — 'Isn't it delicious?' That's this one."
"Isn't what delicious?"
She gave him a look. "Just put the movie on."
He did. She took up her notebook and sat there in her glasses tapping her teeth with a pen and occasionally jotting something down. After a few minutes, he fetched a notebook of his own, one with a fancy leather cover her mother had given him one Christmas and he'd never used.
If after the skin change she emerged a different person, he figured it would be useful to have a record of how she used to be. This he wanted to seem covert but mysterious, and kept eyeing her at the other end of the couch and saying, "Oh!" and then scribbling something down. But she was watching the movie and working and didn't ask what he was up to.
Stats were first: height, weight, hair colour, birthdate, and so forth. Then he moved into slightly more personal information. Her favourite food was tomato soup, she had lost her virginity at seventeen while watching The Hunt for Red October, her desert-island disc was Graceland, and she could not abide the squeak of Styrofoam against Styrofoam or the thought, even abstractly, of eels.
And then he wrote this: I like the way she scrunches her eyes up like a little kid when she eats something she doesn't like. He wrote, Sometimes she laughs too loud in public and I complain but really I find it amazing. He added, Sometimes I find her amazing.
YEARS AGO, FOR their second Valentine's Day together, they decided to eat at separate restaurants — the idea being that loneliness would reinforce their love. It worked: he pushed his food around pathetically with an empty chair across the table, the over-attentiveness of his waiter a poor mask for pity. Later, he clutched her in bed with what could be described only as desperation. It had become a Valentine's Day tradition ever since.
He added this to his list the next night, while she screened something irreverent from France. It required a few pages and an expository style that at first seemed odd beside the pointform notes, but then he liked. He looked up: in the movie one of the characters said, "Je t'aime," to another character, and that character said it back — although there was something Parisian and disaffected about the exchange. The French! They were so mean and great.
Opening his notebook again, he added another little story. The third time they had sex he grunted, "I love you," when he was coming, and afterwards they lay in awkward silence on opposite sides of his futon. "I love having sex with you," he whispered after a few minutes, trying to make it sound like something he'd just covered and was now reiterating, casually.
He was reminded then of this story: one night a few months later they were at a thing for one of their artist friends. Over the crowd of people in complicated shoes they locked eyes and she winked. Something in that wink sang through him, warm. He stumbled beaming (away from some guy detailing his process) across the room and planted one on her, as dumb and happy and slobbery as a puppy. They had pulled away, unspeaking, and for the first time in his life he could see in someone else's eyes exactly how he felt.
On the Tv the woman was now wandering morosely around Paris; her lover was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, at the far end of the couch, she was making notes.
He kicked her.
"Ow," she said. "Don't."
"Hey," he said, nudging her with his foot.
"Hush, will you? This is for school."
He nudged again and she looked at him, exasperated. "What?"
"I love you," he said.
She stared at him. "And?"
"And do you love me?"
"No, I hate you."
"Really?"
"Yes."
He looked at her. She gazed back, her expression impatient. He looked into those eyes, from one to the other across the beautiful nub of her perfect nose, searching for something. But he couldn't find it, because he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be looking for.
AT NOON THE next day he went into the bathroom at work and locked himself in a stall. He put the lid of the toilet down, kept his pants up and sat. There was someone in the next stall over; he could hear the toilet paper being whisked from its dispenser, the scrub of it between ass cheeks, a cough. He waited until the toilet flushed, the stall creaked open, the taps ran, the hand drier roared, and the bathroom door closed. Left alone, he put his head in his hands and sat there like that, on the toilet lid in the stall in the bathroom, until his lunch break was over.
HE GOT HOME that night and she was still at work. The slick clock above the kitchen table, all chrome and Scandinavian, claimed it was half past six. She was usually home before him and had something happening, food or booze, when he walked in the door. In the fridge he found half a bottle of red wine; it had been there for weeks. He poured himself a glass and drank it, ice-cold and sour, as he wandered around the apartment.
As he made his way from room to room, everything struck him as relics: framed photos of a bike trip through the Maritimes, a table that had belonged to her grandparents, the fern that he had nearly killed and she had revived and that now bloomed green and glorious in the living room — artifacts in a museum, a history of their life in things. What would it all mean when she came home with a different skin? Maybe they'd have to get new stuff.
He sat down at the kitchen table and from his briefcase removed the notebook. What had started as a simple inventory had become something else — notes for a story or a film treatment. Yes, a movie! One of those hipster indie rom-coms, maybe, something quirky starring a hot young actor as him and a hot young actress as her, with lots of talking to the camera and a badass soundtrack. Encouraged, he got out his pen to add another story.
One summer years ago they were doing a shop together, and the woman in front of them in line at the grocery store had a shocking sunburn — the sort that looks as though the skin is still cooking, that it would be gooey to touch.
The woman was middle-aged, a typical July mom in a tank top tucked into khaki shorts, a crotch that stretched impossibly from navel to knees. In certain places the sunburn — which spread across the mom's back, down her arms, up her neck — had begun to peel. White fractures split the red, the edges dry and ragged. They stood gawking at the sunburn while the mom placed eight boxes of ice cream onto the conveyor belt in a slow, pained way.
And then, before he could stop her, she was reaching out and taking hold of one of the flaps of dead skin on the mom's back and gently pulling it free. The mom watched the cashier ring her ice cream through, oblivious. He was horrified, but amazed. What sort of human being would do such a thing? And then something snapped and, before she could be caught with the evidence, she flicked the little ribbon of mom away.
On the subway ride home, groceries clustered in bags at their feet, he demanded: "Why?"
"I don't know — weren't you tempted to do it? It was just so…" She made a noise similar to those she produced during sex.
"No. No, it was absolutely not'just so' anything. That was sociopathic behaviour. A cannibal might do something similar."
"Oh, come on. Cannibals eat people, not peel them."
"What do you think the first step is?"
"Please."
They would move in together two months later.
He sat there, reading the story over. It came floating up off the page with the milky miasma of a recalled dream. Crap. Had he made the whole thing up? There had been a sunburned lady once at the grocery store, he was sure — but had the peeling attack actually happened, or was it just something they discussed, or he imagined? He poured out the last drips of wine from the bottle, tipped back a sludgy mouthful, and closed the journal. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the cover before he looked up at the clock.