My wife was lying spread-eagle on the futon in a head-to-toe fur costume the night I thought I’d stopped loving her.

“Can you crack a window?” she asked, fanning herself with her great brown, clawed paw.

I leaned across my armchair and pushed the sash up. Cold night air sifted into the room, heavy with the familiar October smells of dry maple and leaf-rot. We’d cranked the heat in our house so that the small trick-or-treaters who braved the thirty-seven-degree autumn night could feel some warmth on our doorstep. It was our first Halloween living together, and we both felt the unspoken, quietly clenching pressure of having four walls and a street address attached to our mutuality.

Marianne had taken her mask off and put it on the floor beside the coffee table. I could feel it there watching me, lewdly, from the shag rug: huge oversized yellow eyes, bulbous turnip nose, a wide horizontal slice of smile. She was dressed as a Wild Thing, and I was supposed to be the Very Hungry Caterpillar. In some bizarre Freudian arrangement, we’d agreed to go as characters from popular children’s books—not especially arousing couples’ costumes, I guess, but the unvoiced subtext was in common ground. We’d both worked in publishing at points during our careers, and each independently believed there was something profound and cerebral about fifteen-page hardbacks with letters printed the size of fat black carpenter ants and storylines that could be paraphrased in about two sentences. That kind of simplicity meant something.

“Did you see that little fucker in the velociraptor suit? Kid palmed about seventeen Snickers, then sauntered away like a fucking lamb of God. God, I wish I had balls that still hung that high.”

“You never had testicles in the first place,” I reminded her, rather wistfully. My costume consisted mostly of near-skintight green polyester, which itched certain conversation-topics in an almost vindictive way.

My wife didn’t acknowledge this. “Someday, he’s gonna be the same asshole who works two months in Promotions, says something cute to Management, and is moving a potted plant into his Editor cubicle three days later. Meanwhile, I’m still in the Proofreading Department cleaning shit-stains off manuscripts I could’ve written in 7th grade English, mindlessly inserting Oxford commas and changing sentences into the fucking active voice.”

I could feel a headache coming on. “Was his velociraptor any good, anyway? I can’t remember.”

She shrugged. “Spirit Halloween, Party City? Bet dad went out and got it two nights ago, $19.99 on the sale rack. Bet mom buys him Lunchables because she doesn’t have time to pack Ziplock baggies of baby carrots or cookie-cut tuna sandwiches into sharks and dinosaurs. Bet he’s one of two or three, but mom and dad lost energy after the first and couldn’t Ctrl+Z, bet he doesn’t even realize he’s an afterthought, bet—”

“Jesus Christ, Marianne,” I said, and my voice carried a brittleness I hadn’t intended. “Stop.”

She met my gaze then. The clock on the wall beeped: midnight. She looked away, down at her lap.

The clock didn’t seem to change again for a long time.

“There was a baby,” she said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear. “In a little orange pumpkin costume.”

I felt my chest tighten. “I…didn’t see that either.”

She was still looking down, toying with something in the space between her furry brown legs. Slowly, with a gentleness as if she were setting a butterfly free, she opened her hand. There, enclosed in her palm, was a single orange sock. A small sock. A baby’s sock.

“He kicked this off,” she whispered. “His mom didn’t notice.”

“Oh,” I said.

Then, because I still couldn’t find the words: “Oh.”

I knew what I had to do: cross the room, bridge the gap, gather her in my arms and press her face against the broadest part of my chest. I would hold her that way, and she would cry, and an electricity would form between the static of my green polyester and her brown fur, and maybe that would be okay, because the little shock of electrons jumping in between molecules would make us realize the silliness of it all—of our costumes, of Halloween, of seven-year-old boys in cheap velociraptor costumes who take too many Snickers on a night of fake rules and fake reality. But someone had let the air out of my spine, and I couldn’t go to her.

So instead, she cried there on the couch, and I watched from the armchair. And as I watched, I realized that the silliness was not in the illusion of holidays.

She said: “His toes must have been so cold,”

And I said: “I’m sorry.”

That night, I began to accept that there was another reason we hadn’t dressed as Han Solo and Princess Leia, or Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, or Jane and Tarzan, or any other stock couples. Those relationships had all been traced in books and movies countless times; there was an internal language to the sets of each Them, a predefined rhythm of words and syntax which built logically and found conclusion in the assonance of their combined meanings. We were beginning to understand that our Us was not a storyline made of sentences and syllogisms. It was like a picture book—not because it was childish, but because it was all abstraction. Abstraction, like pictures.

And so, pictures: pictures comforted us, I think. It was what our conversations had turned to. We’d used up all our words, we were completely cleaned-out of sentences. Shapes and color were all that remained. Shapes, color, and bodies. Two sets of skin.

At some point, Marianne left the room. I didn’t follow her. Her long brown tail thumped along the wood treads as she climbed the stairs, and I watched the tip whip around the corner to the bedroom before it was gone.

When Marianne and I watched horror movies together, we played an unspoken, but intentional, game: at the jump scares, I grabbed her. “Sssh,” she’d sing-song in a falsetto patronymic, as I pretended to whimper at the crook of her shoulder. “Are you scared? Don’t be scared! It’s just a movie, sshh, just a movie.” I’d lay on the frightened charm: “Would you protect me? If Freddy Krueger were hiding in our half-bath with his razor-fingers, would you protect me?” She’d reach her thin, freckled arms all the way around me, pretending my Me could fit within the enclosure of her Her, and say, “Baby, I’ll always protect you. When things rattle and howl in the basement and your dumb blonde ass tries to go downstairs to ‘See if it’s the generator acting up,’ I’ll sling you over my shoulder, toss you into shotgun of the Nissan, and we’ll get the fuck out of that haunted house.”

We made a cliché out of the cliché, and for a while, that was enough. The irony was sexy, and the ambiguity was intimate. When things did go bump in the night, as they were eventually wont to do, which one of us would save the other?

I didn’t go upstairs for a long time. The basement was quiet, but there was something I was afraid of on the second floor. The ambiguity that had once been intimate was too thick now; I wasn’t so sure who would be able to save me, if I went in search of scary things.

Distraction. I turned on the TV and became quickly entranced by the blue-light. After thirty minutes of infomercials, I caught myself seriously weighing the merits of ordering a Slobstopper (a bib for people who suffer from frequently spilling coffee on themselves while driving). At the last minute, with my fingers punching out the final digit of the 1-800 number, I put the receiver down. I don’t even drink coffee. Besides—a bright blue bib wouldn’t really go with my work slacks. I turned off the TV.

I went into the empty kitchen. I wiped down the countertops and picked the crumbs from the tile grout. I reorganized the rows of Captain Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios in the pantry. I tossed a carton of 1% that was four days past its sell-by date, even though I’m sure it was fine. I put two neon yellow Post-It notes on the cabinets: Call A&E about the water heater acting up, and,

Reschedule next IVF appointment.

The clock on the wall beeped another hour. She was sleeping; she must be. Right? I stayed downstairs. I squeegeed the windows.

I wasn’t trying to give her space—space wasn’t the issue. There was already a vastness, a widening gyre, between us. The issue was that I was a Very Hungry Caterpillar, not a fucking butterfly. Intimacy never used to require wings, and I had no idea how to cross a gyre without a bridge.

Squeegeeing was good, but too soon, the windows were spotless (Goddammit). I started mindlessly Swiffering dust bunnies from around the baseboards. The painted molding was white again before I was ready. The clock said: beep, another hour, beep! I didn’t pay attention. I’d moved on to color-coordinating the vegetable drawer in our Frigidaire. Finally, when the minute hand ticked over to sixty again and the speaker behind the analog clock-head called out to mark another interminable hour: I went upstairs.

The bedroom was dark. I thought: is the darkness of a room without lights the same color as the darkness behind closed eyelids? Because I wasn’t ready for the king-sized mattress yet, I went into the bathroom. Somehow, I hadn’t even heard the water running over the sound of my own internal static. After two steps across the white tiles, I stopped dead in my tracks.

There, behind the dappled glass of the shower door, was my wife.

She stood under the stream of water, water which I knew was ice-cold because of the broken water heater, and slowly massaged soap through her shoulder-length brown hair. As she lifted her arms, I watched her small white breasts respond to the movement, watched the tight skin across her ribs and hipbones pull taut.

I didn’t feel aroused; I didn’t feel voyeuristic, either. I felt the same sort of detached, nonsexual pleasure that accompanies looking at the naked bodies of perfect Greek sculptures, of Roman Venuses and French odalisques. She was exquisite, but she was art. And art belongs to no one. Not even its buyers.

I left the bathroom. I went back to the bedroom and leaned backwards on the bed, staring up at the empty white monoprint of ceiling.

At some point, my wife got out of the shower and came into the bedroom. I felt the mattress dimple as she sat on the edge of the bed beside me in her towel. Her hair was dripping, her nose and cheeks too-red from being scrubbed with stubborn fingers.

“Charles?” she asked.

“What?”

“Did you mean it, what you said at the appointment last week? That we should just stop trying?”

I watched the little rivulets of hair-water slide down the nape of her neck, snaking across her collarbone and past the place where her skin turned from soft pink to milk-white, along the curve of her breast. It was beautiful, she was beautiful, and I couldn’t feel what that meant anymore. Our house had become a museum, and the beautiful things hanging on the walls were protected by thin glass.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

Outside, the wind rattled through the bone-trees. Dead leaves skittered across the pavement like the sweeping of broomsticks. The neighbor’s motion-automated doorstep witch was cackling, and somewhere, cellophane candy wrappers crinkled in sleepless little fingers.

Marianne reached across the bed and put her hand on mine. Her wet fingers were cold, so cold, from the unheated shower water.

We’d had sex a thousand times, fucked often, made love on at least several occasions in our four-year relationship. But there was something deeply, unfamiliarly, non-syllogistically sensual about that wet coldness in her touch. It was like I’d forgotten that bodies and skin could be covered with things, things like cold water, things like experiences, like heartbreak, like diagnoses, and still stay warm on the inside. Still remain. I watched her sternum rise and fall with breath.

It was an abstract realization. A feeling more like a picture in a picture book than a paragraph in a novel.

“Are we going to make it?” my wife asked me.

“I don’t know,” I told her again, but this time, I held her eyes.

“Okay.”

I kept looking at her. She kept looking at me. On the dresser, her stupid fucking Wild Thing mask from Halloween kept looking at both of us.

Somewhere, pages were being turned. Monsters—scary things with terrible roars and terrible teeth—were running through dark woods. Some thought they were chasing scared things, some thought they were running away from other scary things, and actually, they all just ran in ever-tightening circles. Beneath the light of the moon, a little caterpillar ate and ate and ate, chewing through experience, thinking he was afraid of starvation when in reality he was terrified of being sated.

Small eyes began to close.

Beneath all the leftover, stock sounds meant to frighten on Halloween, beneath the dull hum of night ceaselessly turning into day, cars going in opposite directions whispered to each other as they passed on the highway.