Marco glanced up from his lunch plate, catching my eye. He’d become interested in these subjects lately—harassment, memory, the public reverberations of private conduct—ever since getting caught up in a drama of his own in which these topics featured prominently. The drama had ended before any serious damage was done, but he was still unnerved by the experience, and hungry for any kind of elucidation.

I knew what his glance meant, more or less. Imitation had become a topic of particular interest to him, and it was predictable that he’d seize on the speaker’s anecdote as proof of his theories about his own accuser. “Why did she only come out with it now?” he’d begun asking in recent weeks. “Why not thirty years ago? Why not forty for Christ’s sake, when it happened, or rather didn’t happen? Was it just because suddenly everyone else was doing it? Was it some copycat cultural meme thing she’d succumbed to? I’d have thought Julia, of all people, would do anything to avoid seeming unoriginal . . .”

I’d make some noncommittal noise. I wasn’t required to answer Marco, mainly just to listen, and not irritate him with comments suggesting he perhaps didn’t acknowledge the full extent of the wrong done by men to women over the centuries, because he did acknowledge it; he’d just never considered himself one of those men, and even now, when his ordeal appeared to be safely over, resented the threat of being stigmatized as one when he’d done nothing to deserve it.

At any rate the speaker’s anecdote about women suddenly discussing harassment en masse with their therapists clearly played straight into his suspicions about Julia’s timing, even though that was hardly the point the speaker was trying to make. She was actually offering the report as a sign of newly awakening female strength (and I’m sure Marco understood this as well as I did): a silver lining to the cloud threatening the country in the form of a serial harasser of women having won the Republican nomination for the upcoming presidential election.