Rhetorical Questions

Every era has its habits, Izzy thinks idly, looking around the room. Once upon a time, for example, there were virgins until marriage—she had been one, along with a good number of her friends, if they were to be believed. Now thirteen-year-olds have virtuoso tongues that they use on their boyfriends and don't even call it sex. There are women who have babies in their sixties. Fifty year-olds sleep with boys in their twenties; whatever they share, it is unlikely to be conversation. Every family seems to have at least one molester, the way they used to give one child to the church. Poke anywhere and you find yourself stirring a poisoned stew of predator priests and school principals with pictures of naked children in their computers. If you choose to look at it that way, the world is awash with sexual obsessives, with victims and victimizers. If you don't look at it that way, are you naïve?

How has she gotten through so easily, only a philandering husband, that old story, to compromise her perfect innocence? She fears it's because she lacks imagination. (Had she had more imagination, she would have caught him at it sooner.) What kind of ecstasy has she passed up, what thrilling satisfaction at—what? Lunchtime affairs? Lies that were never detected? She is vaguely embarrassed to have been so incurious in the face of so much illicit possibility. In fact, for all that she hated him for it, she had felt a grudging respect for Al when he ventured off the path of—well, fidelity—because she herself so lacked the spirit of daring. That was a paradox and she knew it, that with three quarters of herself she had wished him dead or at least publicly dishonored, while with another sliver of self she had envied him the excitement of a new passion, had wondered what it felt like to cheat and get away with it.

Now she studies the others who have come to Nick and Norman's Christmas party and wonders what kind of secrets they're harboring under their festive clothes and presentable histories. They seem a fairly docile and contented crowd, on the face of it. A dozen or so men and women are clustered around the baby grand, singing really badly. There is something touching—theoretically touching anyway—about people with uncertain pitch enjoying carols and old-timey Broadway hits without a shred of self-consciousness. Like so much else—sex, while she's thinking about it—such music shouldn't be a spectator sport. She wishes she could sidle up to the cozy bunch of them and join in.

But Izzy has a mission and she is bent on fulfilling it: she wants to make some trouble before it's too late. Oh, her ego took a shredding when Al walked out with his newer, spiffier model, but the very commonness of that act protected her, at least a bit, from total despair: he appeared to be doing what was expected of middle-aged males, testing their appeal to see if they still had it. Flashing their lights before the power failed. There was something impressive about it ("Do not go gentle . . . ") and something, face it, equally pathetic. She couldn't take it entirely personally when it seemed like the programmed march of the husbands on their way to extinction.

So, how to begin. Nick and Norman had been her neighbors in a building down the street, and even though they'd moved because they were finished improving their apartment and needed a new project to lavish their salaries on—this one is extravagant, with a glorious view of the city and the lake and an endless number of rooms opening one on another—they were loyal to her and a number of other old friends and invited them every year for turkey and eggnog. They had been together probably as long as she and Al before their collapse as a couple; if anyone is looking for poster children for gay commitment, they deserve the nod. Central casting couldn't do...