So Nico has this theory.
The theory is that sunlight — direct, visible, April sunlight — functions as a thermal layer. Not metaphorically. He means this in a practical, logistical sense. As in: if the sun is out, the sun is working, and you can therefore subtract one jacket from whatever you would otherwise need.
I want to be clear that he explained this to me before we left the apartment, while I was putting on my actual coat and he was pulling on a thrifted military surplus shirt-jacket that I think belonged to someone who served in a conflict I cannot identify. It has a lot of pockets. It is made of a material I can only describe as "aggressively cotton."
"You're going to be cold," I said.
"It's sunny," he said, gesturing at the window the way a professor gestures at a diagram.
It was thirty-four degrees.
We were going to the arts thing downtown — the one near Pulaski Park, where they'd set up vendor tables and a little stage and someone was selling prints of paintings that were mostly, beautifully, just different colors of the Connecticut River. Half of Main Street is currently a detour maze due to the Picture Main Street project, so getting there involved a route that Nico navigated with enormous confidence and zero accuracy, taking us past two test pits and a set of orange cones that seemed to have no discernible purpose except to complete the tableau of a New England April.
He was fine for maybe eleven minutes.
I know it was eleven minutes because I was watching him. There's a specific progression with Nico and cold weather. First he gets quiet. Then he starts moving his hands a lot — ostensibly gesturing at things, actually generating friction. Then he does this thing where he rolls his shoulders back like he's just choosing good posture rather than trying to conserve heat.
By the time we reached the table with the river prints, he had his arms crossed and was nodding very seriously at a watercolor of a heron like a man at an auction who refuses to show weakness.
"Cold?" I asked.
"The wind is a factor I didn't account for," he said, which I thought was quite sophisticated for someone who had recently cited sunlight as a coat substitute.
The wind was not unusual. It was just wind. It was April in Western Massachusetts.
I gave him my scarf. He accepted it without comment, which is its own kind of admission. He wrapped it around his neck with surprising competence and then immediately went back to looking at art with the focused energy of someone who is definitely not cold and never said anything about sunlight.
We spent another hour wandering around. He bought a small ceramic thing he couldn't explain and chatted for ten minutes with the guy selling vintage film posters, apparently about some Youth Cinema Festival poster from an old Northampton run that the guy had in a box. Nico got genuinely excited about this and took a photo to send to someone, because he is, underneath all of the thermal miscalculations, a person who is deeply, specifically enthusiastic about things.
"Good day," he said, when we finally walked back.
"You were freezing," I said.
"I was temperature-challenged," he said. "Briefly. And then I had the scarf."
"My scarf."
"Our scarf," he said, which is a tactic I have learned to recognize and which still works on me every time.
Later he looked at his phone and saw the forecast had capped out at fifty-one and said, thoughtfully, "Huh. So the high was fifty-one." Like he was a scientist reviewing data. Like he had not left the apartment confident that April sunlight was a garment.
"What does that tell you," I said.
He thought about it for a second. "That the low must have been very low," he said, and then looked pleased with himself.
The ceramic thing, for what it's worth, is on our windowsill now. It's shaped like nothing I can name but it catches the afternoon light. He put it there himself, very deliberately, at exactly the angle where the sun hits it.
I did not say anything about the sun.
He is lucky it suits him, is all.