The small side streets overlooked by ploughs were messy and hard to navigate, the winter I lost my wife to Bollywood darling Shahrukh Khan. It was snowy more than cold in upstate New York, the sky often obscured by thick storm clouds. Winter reliably brought Helen low throughout the six years of our marriage. Doctors had told us it was common for a person to go a little off kilter in the months of feeble light. This wasn’t particularly reassuring. In the past, resistant to the idea of mood-altering medication, she’d found some benefit in lying under a reading-lamp for a few minutes in the mornings, visualising the Californian beaches of her childhood. But that year, nothing seemed to help.

By December, our usual swollen-eyed banter over breakfast oatmeal was routinely stillborn and, as soon as she returned from work, she changed into the chenille dressing gown that made her feel frumpy. Like the sickly ghost of a vigilant housewife, she trailed forlornly around our newly purchased house, pointlessly fluffing up cushions, shifting the coffee table by fractions of inches or glancing out the kitchen window at the space vacated by summer’s hydrangeas. I didn’t always get a smile when I cracked one of my jokes.

The bedroom was her only place of comfort. This was where she lay of an evening, her laptop balanced on her chest like a baby riding the ups and downs of her breath, as she warmed herself in the pixelated glow of film after film.

*

In early November, despite flourishing wartime sales, I was unexpectedly laid off from the middle rungs of a local lens-making firm, where I’d been one of several expendable computer programmers. Since then, I’d taken on the responsibility of grocery shopping for my wife and me. Contemptuous of supermarkets, I favoured stores like the Namaste. It was a small Indian market I congratulated myself, with a touch of pioneering vanity, for having discovered tucked away in one of the two identical strip malls on opposing edges of the city.

One night in early January, I tried to convince my wife to come along to the Namaste. I enthused at length about the aisles of spices and pickles, the varieties of lentil, wooden crates of chillies, limes, monstrous okra and shards of dried coconut, and the freezers lined with packages that might have thawed into unforeseen feasts.

‘You’ll get a kick out of it,’ I promised.

My wife agreed to the outing listlessly.

The car journey was slow and remotely painful. Nothing actually went wrong—no skidding or close scrapes—but it was as if just past the limits of my squinting sight, beyond the white-out conditions veiling houses and streetlights in an extraterrestrial haze, lurked some event capable of provoking unpleasant adrenaline. The feeling left me jittery.

Inside the store, as I was used to by then, my wife wasn’t fully with me. For a stormy weekday around dinnertime, there were a lot of shoppers. On the floor, icy trails shadowed one another and diverged.

‘Isn’t this great?’ I asked, the way you try to ignite a kid’s wonder without entirely believing you’ll get a flicker.

‘It’s nice.’ Her hands stayed limp. Her beige scarf was almost falling from her shoulder.

In the line at the checkout with our basket, I noticed she’d drifted elsewhere. I spotted her in a corner of the store. Her back to me, my wife was scanning two broad sets of shelves. It was strange that I hadn’t remembered those cupboards cluttered with the multicoloured spines of DVDs and increasingly obsolete videos arranged according to language, with a separate section for cricket. My awareness had hurdled them on previous visits. It was only then, under her gaze, that they assumed a reality for me.

But I didn’t think much of it. I went back to staring at a framed portrait of Ganesha hanging from the wall behind the harried cashier. The elephant-deity was haloed by tiny, flashing fluorescent lights. It was jolly and festive, the antithesis, I decided, of the dull suburbs we’d travelled through to the store.

I’d paid and was opening my palm for the change. My wife startled me.

‘And this.’ Her voice was quiet. A vein pulsed at her left temple.

‘Hon?’

‘We’ll get this.’ Her scarf slipped, pooling on the wet floor.

Instead of bending to retrieve it, I glanced at the cover of the DVD she’d placed on the counter. I was suddenly looking into the glossy-haired, fleshy-lipped face of my future rival.

*

Bollywood films are long and involved, I came to learn. They are set in palatial residences, filmy curtains plump in the breeze. Colour simmers, froths, overflows—scarlet, saffron, emerald green, ink black, peacock blue, amethyst, gold. Protagonists flaunt extraordinarily extensive wardrobes. Landscapes are out-of-this-world and so are emotions, which vibrate at frenzied heights. Longing, sadness, hatred, remorse. Love, of course, is the star. A man and a gorgeous woman fall for one another (or the attraction is one-sided or takes time to surface in both). But he or she is promised or engaged, with the auspicious dates for the dreaded marriage approaching fast. Or one would-be lover is Hindu and the other Muslim, or a class discrepancy is the obstacle. Family honour is at stake. Virtuous children refuse to betray parents, though it breaks their hearts, or they do betray them, eloping, and are desperate for forgiveness. Sometimes non-resident Indians, NRIs, are the protagonists, leading new lives seasoned with nostalgia in London, New York or Melbourne. There will be weeping.

And every so often, the full dance sequence erupts. All rules of temporal, spatial and any other class of ‘logic’ are relaxed. The separated are united. The unrequited is requited. Conflict dissolves like a mirage. Pretty much everyone can and is willing to dance. To give it a go, at least.

Things end well in Bollywood. Almost always. But if lovers cannot be brought together now, in this mortal existence, then there is the consolation offered by reincarnation: so many opportunities to merge with the twin soul down through subsequent lives, to rewrite events the way they are meant to happen. Another thing. Up until the most recent and most daring films, although there was apparently room for all the hip-thrusting sexual innuendo in the world, a simple kiss remained tantalisingly taboo.

*

I can’t say I’d missed my job since my retrenchment. Not long before receiving my marching orders, I’d developed an annoying case of carpal tunnel syndrome. Awkward stretching and anti-inflammatory drugs had done little to alleviate it. So I was actually enjoying some time out. I’d been sick of writing code, anyway. Never my idea of what I wanted to do when I grew up, it made me feel like an automaton. My former colleagues were a mix of deer hunters and religious fundamentalists, with a small, troubling overlap between the two groups. My severance package would cover our mortgage payments, if not the interest on our student loans, for a year, during which time I’d get myself another position. The only thing that stopped me finding unemployment soothing was the sensation of abandoning my wife, who became the solitary breadwinner. Until then, at least we’d been companion zombies, going through the dreary motions of drudgery side by side.

She slid that first DVD into her laptop, a bowl of blue corn chips between us, as we lay in bed. I can’t pinpoint the precise moment it happened. Had it already started at the Namaste? Or was it a few minutes into the feature? Helen rediscovered pleasure that night. The shift was brusque, inexplicable. She was embarking on a lark. Her laughter at the comic moments shocked me. And the moistening of her eyes during a declaration of filial love. She even swayed her shoulders to the dance numbers, uninhibited in her floral pyjama top with the pale, generous view of her throat and collarbones. I was disoriented. I massaged her thigh, savouring her occasional sigh. My libido surged. But she was consumed by the screen and I’d grown expert at letting desire wane and dissipate. A strong wind rushed past our house. The storm gave no sign of abating. By the intermission, sleepiness had descended on me. I must have dozed off shortly after.

Of course I welcomed my wife’s new interest, initially. She wasn’t able to account for what it was about the title or the cover of the DVD that had attracted her. She’d never shown a weakness for Indian culture or an inclination towards its cinema in the past. As much as I tried to get into it, I was out of sync with Bollywood from the beginning. I’d known it would be campy. But that first movie was so tortuously drawn out with its obscene paroxysms of sentimentalism, humour several degrees off the course of my own, music that was nothing more than cheap pop in someone else’s language. The leading man, ingratiating himself through endless attempts at cuteness, wore on me. My wife’s tolerance of him, indeed her enthralment, would have revealed his fulminating conquest had I been paying closer attention.

She watched the same movie again the next night, starting in the kitchen that was fragrant from the spices of the chana masala I was preparing, and resuming watching after dinner, in bed.

‘Not tired?’ I asked eventually.

‘Not quite, sweetie.’ She smiled inwardly, rapt. ‘You sleep.’

The pattern was forming. I inserted foam earplugs and turned away, the world of sound retreating but not gone. Tacky choruses jerked in and out of my consciousness.

*

I was on my knees cleaning out the fridge, throwing away whatever had passed its date, when my wife arrived with two more films featuring her subcontinental Romeo. She’d dropped by the Namaste after a trying run of committee meetings.

‘The old woman recommended these.’ She appeared flushed.

‘Oh?’

Over the next weeks, my wife came to know all the Namaste employees better than I ever had—the old woman and the older, joking man, the younger, serious turbaned man and his shrill, high-strung daughter. It seemed they shared the same tastes. She visited them sometimes twice a week until she exhausted their stock of Shahrukh Khan films, finishing with the lower budget ones that looked twenty-five years older than they were and even something called A Date with Shahrukh. I didn’t like to ask. She then began ordering over the internet. I couldn’t fathom her need. You’d seen one, you’d seen them all, I judged from the many snippets of Bollywood flicks I was unable to avoid. Plot lines were so formulaic that films converged in the memory. Characters and scenarios echoed one another, overlapping to form a gaudy continuum, a claustrophobic hall of mirrors.

‘My day’s been quiet,’ I said. She stood clutching her rental movies with the oblivious air of pride of a dog presenting you with something it has killed. ‘This tzatziki smells okay. Yoghurt can really last.’

Sun yellowed the kitchen floor briefly. The fragile light falling over worn linoleum squares was strangely affecting, like a hologram.

She might have been disappointed by my reaction. I’d desperately wished for her return from the sombre place she’d inhabited for months. In a way, she was back. But I wasn’t the source of her newfound pleasure, nor that pinkness in her cheeks. Her involvement with Bollywood was too flippant, reckless almost. It wasn’t like her. I should explain. Seasonal affective disorder aside, Helen was typically a serious woman, even when having a good time. She was fun to be around, sure, but a gravity accompanied her enjoyment. Fine food or sex would silence her, render her thoughtful. ‘Oh, no,’ I once heard her say soberly at the MOMA, in front of a canvas she loved. I’d always interpreted her attitude as some variety of existential wistfulness, perhaps to do with her intuition of the transience of happiness. She was not one to take fun lightly. Yet this, this current fixation was lightness at its most insubstantial. That she could abandon herself with unreserved glee to such kitsch was deeply disconcerting.

I fantasised rising from my knees in front of the fridge and easing the DVDs from her fingers. I would archly unzip her skirt and lead her to our bedroom with the stern elegance of a tango dancer, pausing despite her protestations to light a stick of incense and retrieve the shiraz from the basement. The wine would colour the winter cracks in her lips a primal crimson.

I rose and approached her. Her back was to me. I embraced her. The sharp, plastic edges of the DVDs she was gripping pushed into my arm. We hadn’t been that close for some time. Her skin was faintly warm. I held Helen so tightly that turning to face me wasn’t easy for her.

*

I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t a model husband, although it’s true my new idleness had made me handier around the house. As I’ve said, I’d been taking care of our grocery shopping alone. When my wife became a compulsive client of the Namaste, I stopped going. Instead, I began to frequent an organic cooperative, where the Latin American folk tunes drifting over the aisles relaxed me. The first time I tried one of their bananas, the flavour was so potently banana, it struck me as a forgotten flavour from childhood or the childhood of the race. I was charmed by the readiness of co-op customers to hold forth on such subjects as a disturbance in the migratory patterns of caribou, the perils of driveway shovelling or political despair. The co-op became part of my health kick.

I decided my body was going to be my capital. My arms had been casualties of computer technology, but would heal. I’d be healthy, solid and invulnerable to the slackness I knew would claim my unencumbered days if I wasn’t careful. I would set an example of wellbeing for my wife. For years, I’d been a lax exerciser. I’d done some half-hearted hiking and once bought a special ‘Cardio-Max Trampoline’. I used it twice. Now I joined the downtown YMCA, a humble facility in an area that inspires unease in the inhabitants of the easeful suburbs.

At the Y, I avoided dwelling on my prospects and the situation at home, launching into a program of cross-training in which I gradually raised the ante. Treadmill, bike and rowing machines on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the CNN on the overhead TV monitors agreeably leaching away my thoughts. Tuesdays and Thursdays were swimming and weights. I lost a few pounds quickly. I toned up.

*

It was a Thursday. I was using a disinfected paper towel to wipe off the slippery grips of the weights I’d been lifting, when a woman next to me caught my eye. Petite, in adherent gym pants and a peach tank top, she was doing masterful abdominal work on an inflated plastic sphere. I wondered what it was like to be her, to have her control.

‘I’ve never tried that.’

‘Balancing is tricky at first,’ she responded, not in the least out of breath or surprised I had spoken to her, ‘but you get the hang of it pretty fast.’ Her brow, tense, slick with sweat, made a wonderful illustration of discipline.

‘You sure do it well.’

She wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was neutral and yet satisfied, self-sufficient. When she climbed off the ball, as nonchalant as a cowboy dismounting, I saw her gym pants were slightly darker with perspiration where they clung to her lower back. A shadow of moisture, too, over her groin.

‘How much do you lift?’

I didn’t understand. ‘Excuse me?’

She nodded at the weights, dabbing her forehead methodically with a towel.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Those.’

*

Angie was a personal trainer and instructor of hip-hop aerobics, Pilates, body conditioning and core-strengthening classes. The nuances between these escaped me. Angie had put up an infant for adoption at eighteen, I learned weeks later. More quickly, I discovered she was married to an accountant. Her husband had suffered from polio as a child and as a consequence wore special, custom-made shoes. They’d dated serenely for over a decade before he eventually popped the question. By that time, there was no logical answer but yes, although something, which used to be there between them, had moved on. The way Angie said this reminded me of the stoicism that seems to belong to what is known as ageing with dignity. Her husband worked in another, more dynamic city and was home only on weekends. This meant we could meet at her place, a sort of chalet on half an acre that was a gift from her parents-in-law, who were in real estate. Wall-to-wall carpet had just been laid over the cold floorboards. It was moss-coloured with oddly futuristic copper flecks and a persistent odour of newness that came back to me, nauseating, as I drove home afterwards.

Angie was not just fit. She was a professional. I hadn’t known bodies came that hard. She was as taut as a drum. All over. There was no depth to her quaintly irrelevant belly button whatsoever. Touching her with closed eyes was like touching one of the bodies from those anatomical charts, where a representative man and a representative woman stand showing themselves from the back and the front, casually skinless, so you can observe how they are made. Angie was the exemplary woman. I grasped the protrusions of her bones and muscles with a sense that I was sleepwalking but uncannily aware. For a while it was comforting to imagine I knew how she was put together, to have an idea of her component parts and their possible workings. But Angie’s unrelenting firmness also frightened me a little, accustomed as I was to my wife’s body, which tended to softness.

‘Aren’t UV lamps dangerous?’

Cupping her buttock in my hand, I squeezed past Angie in her downstairs bathroom—we never used the en suite—for my turn in the shower.

‘What do you mean?’

A damp bandaid hung from her sculpted left thigh. I hadn’t seen it earlier.

Grimacing, she said, ‘I cut myself shaving. An old razor.’

The semi-opaque shower door slid between us, blurring Angie’s hard mass.

Over the pressure-jet water, I called, ‘This won’t last, will it?’

‘No,’ she confirmed in an ageless voice, flushing the toilet.

I tensed and hesitated in my vigorous soaping. I waited for the shower to run cold, but it didn’t. Angie left the bathroom quietly.

*

My wife wouldn’t be back from the college for another couple of hours. It was a Mickey Mouse private college: overprivileged, apathetic students, paralysing administrative clutter and faculty pettiness. Helen’s field was visual culture. She had no real time for research any more, but her specialisation had been memento mori, those morbid photos of the recently dead taken in the Victorian era. The pictures gave me the creeps, but Helen insisted it was far more natural to look death in the face than to prissily avert the gaze. To be honest, when we were first dating, her thing for post-mortem art titillated me. It was exotically gothic.

Instead of driving back to our empty house, I found my way to the park by the river. It wasn’t snowing, but the radio forecast said wind was blowing down from the Arctic and it felt like it. It was getting dark. The long tunnel of night had already taken the city in its mouth. The frozen river had an aura of milky secrecy.

I turned off the engine. Sitting in the parking lot in my salt-ravaged ’92 Honda, I identified the shape of an owl in a barren tree. A black hatchback was parked nearby. What brought someone here to the river at nightfall, anyway? The windshield fogged with my breath. I could smell Angie’s wall-to-wall carpet in all its chemical brilliance. I wished I smoked or drank or gambled or painted large, violent canvases or was a fanatical triathlete. The paths of solace were closed to me.

*

Shahrukh Khan, the actor, pulls off equally well slapstick goofiness and suave self-possession. It’s true. He can be funny, aloof, a blubbering mess, tender, sexy—skipping between these states in the course of a film. He plays the same hand often, because that’s how he wins. With a soulful silence speaking of high moral ground, he will melt a mother’s heart, even a mother-in-law’s. Guaranteed. He may be a high-flying business exec, a showbiz legend, terminally ill, a hedonistic layabout rich guy, a chef, a journalist, a mournful violinist, a soldier, a helicopter-rescue squadron leader, a NASA earth scientist, a tyrannical king, an embodied divinity, but he is first and foremost Shahrukh Khan. The bastard.

He said it in an interview: ‘I’m Shahrukh Khan. I do what I do.’

His drawcard is his smile. Holy Christ, that smile! Such false innocence. This is how it goes. Eyes down, to start with. Don’t mistake it for modesty. His head will turn and tilt, eyes now taking flight along a smooth, upwardly slanting trajectory. The smile is insinuating itself. In another beat, there will be no more pretending that eyes and lips are not accomplices. They will flatter one another knowingly. Dimples finally in full evidence, the air of mischievous, cherubic romanticism barely conceals his flagrant lust. No man this side of the screen, I regret to say, comes close.

*

I’d rarely seen my wife as beautiful as she was after the long nights of little sleep. Courted through the early hours by the latest movie, any rest that came for her was fitful. Tossing and turning, she woke me one Saturday. I lay there, the venetian blinds backlit by cloud-filtered light. The morning was muted and cautious, as though the world were hung-over and had to ease gingerly into the day. We weren’t touching, but I sensed clammy heat emanating from her. I interpreted this as vivid, unnatural dreams. Those stories of desperate, noble love sank their claws deeply. My mouth tasted of betrayal. I got up, tugged on sweats and set off jogging along slushy footpaths to the not-quite-authentic French bakery.

Over breakfast, she had an exquisite pallor. Ethereal, nearly. Her features seemed unstable and impermanent. If I’d reached out, I might almost have moulded them into another arrangement. Their vulnerability was perfect. Heartbreaking.

‘Good movie last night?’

She nodded, dripping coffee from the pot into her warmed milk. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she ventured, ‘why don’t we learn Hindi together?’

I considered it a weak gesture of inclusion. ‘I don’t think so. German, maybe.’ I was eating quickly.

I had to wait for this infatuation to die. There’d been obsessions before. I’d observed her through her Marxist, raw ‘cooking’, screen-printing and Baha’i phases, but while these had been intense at the outset, she’d brought her usual self-discipline to them and they were short-lived, petering out into gentle self-irony by perhaps the third week. I had to be tolerant, patient. Shahrukh Khan was the common link between the DVDs she’d been watching; he was obviously the attraction. There was a finite number of films in which Khan’s indecently puckered mouth could star. Only so many transparent shirts the devoted lover-son-martyr could wear.

‘By the way, how many movies has he made? That guy?’

Knowing full well who we were talking about, she prevaricated, poking with her fork.

‘More than fifty motion pictures. In thirteen years,’ she told me slowly, apparently unaware of the toasted baguette cooling at her fingertips or the dish of pears I’d diligently peeled, sliced and stewed. Slightly dizzy, I rattled my stack of empty plates. ‘Imagine. And there are several in pre- and post-production right now. He does his own stunts and he produces, too. He’s a phenomenon. Arguably the best-known actor in the world. Did you realise?’

My wife stood, her food almost untouched. Leaving the table prematurely had become a habit. I followed her. In the bathroom, she was fastidiously rinsing her toothbrush. The two of us barely fit in there, one to either side of the laundry rack burdened with drying clothes. I picked up a sock from the floor and hung it.

‘Lost your appetite?’ I had her cornered.

‘I’m sorry it doesn’t do anything for you, but Bollywood fascinates me. Maybe I’m responding to the shot composition, I don’t know, the framing. Choreography.’ She laboured to justify herself. ‘The atmospheres. It’s a lesson in Indian culture, social behaviour … customs.’

I was sure she’d been rehearsing those lines.

‘It’s not some colonial wet dream, then?’ Her patronising list had made me lose my head. ‘A little Orientalism?’ I waited a long, sour moment, as she smirked painfully. ‘You’re hot for him, aren’t you?’ My words had a drunkard’s indecency. ‘Admit it.’

‘Fuck off,’ she snapped, squeezing toothpaste onto her brush. She turned towards me, grave. ‘What do you want me to say?’ Her tone was completely stripped of amusement. ‘It’s my new toy, my pick-me-up. My winter antidote.’

She brushed her teeth with hard strokes. The grey splotches beneath her eyes accentuated her radiance. Ejaculating toothpaste into the sink, she muttered, as though I’d been cross-examining her pitilessly for hours, ‘Leave me alone. Please.’

Her new hobby was something of a joke—how could her childish fixation on Khan be anything but silliness? But I was coming to see that it was also, in a subterranean sense I couldn’t grasp, quite serious after all.

I became haunted by a recurring waking dream of my wife as a Bollywood actress. Though I would have preferred Kama-Sutra raunch, oiled bodies and acrobatics, I saw her in pink and orange or blue and green saris or, at other times, provocatively jaunty, midriff-flaunting streetwear. She was cavorting, say, in a springtime field against a Swiss mountainscape. The tinkling of bangles and anklets triggered explosions of testosterone in me. Wind machines teased her floating hair. She lip-synched cheekily, part The Sound of Music, part femme fatale. Taunting me with her chastity, she toyed with her veil, trailing it like a kite, peekabooing. She laughed as I eventually moved in for the kiss and always, at the last moment, she eluded me.

*

My fling with Angie ended as abruptly as it had begun, in keeping with the hollowness of the whole episode. I still saw her at the Y, on a Stairmaster or stretching elaborately on a rubber mat. Her hamstrings were something else. We avoided eye contact. When I remembered the mossy carpet in her house, my stomach churned. Meanwhile, my next job did not appear in the employment pages and my wife’s obsession endured.

At home, I took to sitting out in the garage. I ruminated amid old skis, skates and camping gear, the rusted, ponderous tools of a former tenant and various boxes we hadn’t seen fit to unpack. These boxes’ intimacy with the past weighed on me. I sat in my jacket, scarf and fingerless gloves. The garage was chilly, but curiously accommodating, like a little rustic chapel.

Coming into the house on a bitter night, the moon high and impotent behind fog, I found my wife crying at the kitchen table. Putting down an antique bottle I’d discovered in the garage, I drew up a chair beside her. I let her weep. The bottle looked vaguely medicinal. I didn’t know how to touch her. A few moments passed.

She managed to get out: ‘Suddenly they’re in Egypt or the Caribbean. They don’t have to explain it. It just happens and it’s normal and everyone’s happy. You know? There’s such joy.’

I sighed. ‘It’s not real, though, is it?’ I didn’t like to see her that way, but I was glad some catharsis had arrived.

She repeated ‘joy’, weeping some more. Listening to her sob, an idea came to me with the force of an epiphany. I would convince her to take two weeks off work for a road trip to Montreal, something we’d talked of doing before we married, always finding reasons to postpone. I proposed it in a confused rush. Belatedly, I asked myself whether going further north in the winter might not be right for her.

She brought a hand to her damp cheek, consenting almost too easily. ‘I’d like that. To take a trip. Yeah.’

I was immensely relieved. We needed it. Our holiday would be a kind of litmus test. On the internet the next day, I found a studio apartment for rent one street across from Saint Denis.

‘We’ll be right in the heart of things,’ I announced, pointing at a map. ‘The room is small, well, tiny, only two hundred square feet and basic, but’, I added tactfully, ‘that’s good. We’ll be getting away from everything. Phone, TV, computer …’

She pouted mournfully. ‘Could we take …?’ she began, but fell silent.

*

Reflecting on the Montreal weather, Diogo Pinto da Silva said, ‘We have an expression in Portuguese for this.’ He gave some thought to the translation, before enunciating carefully, ‘No-one deserves this.’

Helen laughed uproariously.

Diogo, a Brazilian exchange student living above our boxy apartment on Prince Arthur, was addicted to computer games. The noise didn’t bother us. We were in a suspended state, enjoying a reprieve. Nothing bothered us at all. Not even the cold, which our status as tourists transformed into novelty. It hovered around forty below during our sojourn, Fahrenheit and Centigrade coming to a frigid understanding. We developed a short-stepping, weirdly vertical run adaptable to various qualities of ice. Bundled up, we hastened from cafés to restaurants, where the staff seemed to possess above-average talents for mirth. We devoured pastries and bagels. We put away Greek, Tibetan, Ethiopian, Taiwanese and Lebanese meals. I wasn’t keeping track of my ATM withdrawals. They were magical. My estrangement from the salaried workforce had no weight or meaning in Montreal. When we rediscovered chocolate, glutting ourselves on dark bars flavoured with pink pepper, green tea, olive oil, it felt as though we’d regressed to a more youthful time that was, however, superior to more youthful times.

Making love was our respite from eating. We hadn’t known anything so fierce in years. As for talk, there wasn’t much. Our conversations were loose and disconnected; the sort of conversations you have with yourself, entering or leaving sleep. We slept deeply in that apartment barely bigger than the bed. Only physical needs existed, forcefully asserting themselves in a benignly foreign world.

*

The room already dark, Helen slept on her stomach, her spine a dim, bony ladder down to the mounds of her buttocks. Cars moved through the snowy streets, lullingly episodic. The quilt had slid to the floor, leaving the sheet that reached only to the backs of our knees. Goosebumps rose on my legs. My body was receptive. Dragging a corner of the quilt from the floor to cover Helen, it dawned on me that winter, contrary to popular belief, was the most erotic season. Our cringing response to the cold was in fact an intense sensitisation, an ardent awareness in the flesh, while the stripping off of layers performed as we enter heated interiors was an ongoing, teasing simulation of more complete undressings.

Helen stirred, rolling onto her side and drawing her knees endearingly into her chest. Her eyelids parted a fraction. ‘Is it time yet?’ She was not entirely awake.

‘No, darling. Not yet.’

She lifted the quilt over her head.

I pulled on an old T-shirt, cotton gone soft as skin, and stepped towards the window. I don’t know why we were never concerned about people looking in at us through that window. Something itched over my breastbone. I lifted the neck of my T-shirt. Not seeing anything by the streetlight, I felt for and surprisingly caught a strand of my wife’s hair. It appeared to be white when I examined it.

Even hours after we’d left our bed, I was constantly finding filaments of Helen’s hair on my person. Inside T-shirts or woven through sweaters. Sometimes, hooked over an ear like a fine earring or coiled around the base of my penis. I’d forgotten this would happen long before. Her silky, immaterial way of marking me hers. Considering how much time had passed since those discarded hairs had regularly sought me out, I became sad. And it was then I decided I had to raise the unspoken subject.

The next day we were sitting on the futon around two in the afternoon, rousing ourselves for lunch. Was she pining for Bollywood? Her roaming appetite and unusual passion might have been symptoms of withdrawal.

‘Can you explain? I’ll really try to understand.’ I focused on the cheap microwave oven on top of the bar fridge. ‘You know, you were miserable for ages. I didn’t know how to change it. I couldn’t change it. Losing my job probably didn’t help. Let’s not talk about that now.’ I flexed my stubby toes. ‘But you found those movies.’ It seemed better not to mention him.

The Brazilian neighbour was arriving home. We looked beyond the artificial plant inside the window to the blanched footpath, where Diogo was scraping his boots against the bottom step of the staircase rising to his upstairs apartment. Strangely, the puffs of his breath reminded me of the steam spouting from a train in a picture book belonging to my brother when he was a baby.

‘They’re so much more vibrant than anything else,’ she said. ‘I told you before. You weren’t listening.’ We ducked so that Diogo didn’t see us. ‘And I like the dancing,’ she concluded softly. ‘Call me crazy. I do.’

‘The dancing?’ Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t hide my incredulity. ‘All that poncing about?’ I protested jealously. ‘The posturing, the gyrating, the … implausible changes of outfit!’

I was once more saying the wrong things. I calmed down. It was cruel of me to blame her for finding refuge and contentment in fantasy. Who didn’t? Timidly, as gauchely as on a first date, I stroked Helen’s face beneath the right cheekbone.

‘Can we get through this?’ I implored, sounding like a B-grade actor. ‘Will we make it?’

I wonder now if I was talking about more than marriage. Maybe I wanted her to assure me we’d get a shot at being something else when we grew up, at being different or at not growing up. I felt practically ready to tell her I wanted in on the Bollywood ride, if it meant that much to her. There had to be something there I’d missed. I’d try again, if she’d let me. If it wasn’t a solo journey—or too late. A distance was already opening between us. The glare off the snow put her at the centre of a tragic spotlight.

‘If not in this life,’ she murmured, her eyes infused with emotion, ‘then, I promise you, in all the reincarnations to follow.’

The glowing winter scene framed by our rented window did appear to suggest the possibility of an afterlife. Of a death, at least, that was no stranger to grace. Our neighbour settled in for a session on his Game Boy.

The bouncing, electronic rhythms reached us through the ceiling and the walls, as though via the bones of a huge skull. My wife gave a funny half-smile. The emotion of a moment earlier had dispersed, leaving her placid. Her attention had moved on. She leaned over to the table and picked up a square of chocolate. It was very dark chocolate, virtually pure cocoa. I’d been puzzled by just how minimally sweet it was when I tried it that morning. Poised on the brink of bitterness, its taste had given me a peculiar thrill after I’d overcome my initial impulse to spit it out. I took her offering delicately. I closed my eyes and moved in bravely for a kiss.

— Kristel Thornell