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that they were not—sexual movements left North London’s Jews unmoved. The double first of marriage and babies was still the ultimate accomplishment desired of one’s twenties. He had been arguing only to grant women vague, hypothetical liberties, for Rachel herself had told him that she could never imagine even wanting to sleep with a man she didn’t love. But then—growing up where she did, had Rachel ever really had a choice but to feel that way? When Adele Summerstock had done “everything but” with Dan Kirsch during his seventeenth birthday party (a scandalously precocious age in North West London, and particularly shocking as they had not been going out for the essential six months that lent respectability to teenage sexual congress), it was not only their classmates and friends from synagogue who knew about it but also the parents of their classmates and friends from synagogue. No one would ever admit to having confided such things in their mother and father, and yet somehow information would leak between the generations, from child to parent to parent to child. Eventually, quietly, everyone in Hampstead Garden Suburb would know.
    That night, Adele Summerstock’s reputation had not fallen to its knees alongside her—it was not a society anywhere near that condemnatory. But years later when she married Ari Rosenbaum’s older brother, Anthony, it was probable that ninety percent of her wedding guests knew the tale, and its unfortunate coda, that in her inebriation, she had subsequently brushed her teeth with Dan Kirsch’s mother’s toothbrush. It was likely that her new mother-in-law was mentally attempting to suppress these details even as Adele Summerstock was processing down the aisle. In such a climate, of course Rachel would not want anything other than that which she had.
    She had been Adam’s first too, of course. But later there had been that time at university—those six months in their second year, a glitch of which no one was permitted to speak—when they had broken up, and he had been a single man of twenty. During that dark period Rachel had twice kissed Ari Rosenbaum, with whom she had long ago slow-danced at several bar mitzvahs and had also kissed once before, at an “evening in” watching Pulp Fiction at Gideon Press’s house when they were all fifteen. But not even Ari had been granted access to her celebrated assets—only Adam had ever unhooked that hardworking brassiere, let alone removed the matching briefs. When they reunited she was wiser only in the ways of making Adam jealous (at school Ari had been in the First Eleven, Adam only in the Second). Adam had notched up a one-night stand and a three-month relationship with a girl named Kate Henderson. He was therefore a man of the world.
    Rachel as an independent sexual being was a foreign idea to him and not one that she herself had ever encouraged. Instead, she was merely the central benefactress of his own erotic subsistence. But thinking about Ellie’s choices not only made him momentarily envious, but also made it seem obvious that Rachel must have wondered. She might even have conjured it, have envisioned the way that her body would respond to another man, a different touch—although he could not believe she would do such a thing while she was actually in bed with him. She wouldn’t.
    The idea of anyone else with Rachel repelled him—but suddenly, without volition, he could hear her breath as other hands left their imprint on her hips, could see her head thrown back as someone else knelt and thrust. He felt a surge of jealousy so powerful he burned with it. It was sickening—and mesmerizing. Who might she imagine? Was this how Rachel felt when she thought about him with Kate? Did she wonder how it had been between them? Kate had been nothing like Rachel—muscled and broad-shouldered from rowing, a little stocky perhaps, she’d had strength that had lent her unions with Adam the controlled violence of a wrestling match.