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pale butt, his professorial penis—and then he gets in and presses his freezing-cold skin against me. I yelp. “Good God! You’ve turned to ice!”
    “It’s February, Annabelle.” He pronounces the first r in February very precisely. I always say FebYOOary, which drives him nuts. “It’s even snowing outside.”
    “It’s always snowing outside here, and that is why God invented fleece bathrobes for people who get up early. Here, never mind. Put your hands here, and I’ll warm you up.” I put his frozen hands under my sweatshirt, at great personal sacrifice, and press my face against his. He blinks at me; he is always blinking his watery gray eyes. He probably needs lubricating eye drops, and I should talk him into going to see Sam, the eye doctor. I’ll have to remember to make him an appointment. Maybe he’ll even keep it. “I think you may be technically halfway to being cryogenically frozen. How long have you been up?”
    “Since four. I didn’t sleep well,” he says heavily, then clears his throat. Quite unattractively, actually. “I was tossing and turning all night so I finally just got up and went in to write the new section.”
    “Oh, that’s too bad. Did you get a lot done, at least?”
    “Some. Not really. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s time for our other concerns now.” He sighs and closes his eyes and concentrates, which means we are entering sex mode now. I kiss him on his cold lips and he smooches me back, but I know him well enough to know that he’s not thinking about me or sex; he’s still locked in his book, and his body is not going to consent to anything else right now.
    “Uh-oh. Factory World seems to have followed you back to bed,” I say lightly.
    He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “It’s awful. This morning I realized that I’ve got to interview more descendants. I don’t have enough. Not nearly enough.”
    “It’ll be okay,” I say. “You’ve gotten five survivors, and the pictures of the kids inside the mill, and the daughter of the foreman—”
    “It’s not enough, Annabelle,” he says, a tad sharply. “And now I’ve got to stop for days and grade exams. I have dozens of essays to read. Dozens! And on top of that I’m not sleeping.”
    I stroke his hair. “Well, if you’re tired, maybe you should go back to sleep for an hour or so. We certainly don’t have to—”
    “Wait,” he says. He sits up, round-eyed with alarm. “Do you have any paper in the nightstand?”
    “Stationery, yes.”
    “Can you get it?”
    I roll over and get the box of fine powder-blue Crane stationery, which came from my mother’s condo when we cleaned it out after she died, and I find a ballpoint pen and roll back and hand the box and the pen to him. I have a momentary pang of sadness—this stationery, my mother. “This will just take a sec,” he says. “Then we’ll go on with our schedule.”
    “Fine. Don’t worry about it. I have all day.”
    He frowns while he writes, and the tip of his tongue sticks out. I lie propped on one elbow and watch him, notice how gray his whiskers have recently become. But I am thinking that this moment could be funny, you know. We could both laugh about how lovely it is to know somebody so well that you’re relaxed enough to stop making love and, oh, say, take some precoital notes on a labor relations problem. Instead—and maybe this is just because of Jeremiah floating tauntingly around the room—I feel a growing wad of irritation just under my breastbone. I know this feeling: it’s a cousin of the mood that made me cry among the pork chops.
    “I certainly hope this is going to be one of those breakthrough moments for the book,” I say. “Are we postponing our orgasms for some good reason at least?”
    He waves me off. He doesn’t like the word orgasm; he once told me it’s an ugly word, and that it makes the sex act sound like something clinical.
    “Listen,” I say after a moment, as he turns the paper