“How about ‘The Abusers’?” Hanan said, “or ‘The Harassers’?”

She’d been sitting quietly next to him, working her phone and combining precisely measured amounts of grain and seed into her cereal bowl, seemingly uninterested in his words. It occurred to me that she still didn’t know anything about his own troubles in this department. I remembered his remark about not wanting to “put her to the test.”

“That’s not the aspect of their stories I’d want to focus on,” he said.

“There is no other aspect.”

She pointed to his newspaper, where a picture of Roger Ailes, all chins and jowls and baldness and bad skin, stared out. “You think people want to hear about how unfairly he’s been treated?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“It isn’t?”

“No!”

He frowned, staring at the photo, and one could practically see the heavy machinery of his interest in this topic grinding through its cycles.

His daughter, Alicia, emerged from the basement with her girlfriend, both of them groggy from a night on the town. “Morning, Daddy,” she said sweetly, stooping for a kiss on the forehead. The tones and habits of childhood were still second nature to her. I wondered if it had ever crossed her mind that coming nonchalantly to her father’s breakfast table in a t-shirt and shorts with a female lover who, from the pale tuft of beard at her chin, seemed (though Marco hadn’t dared ask) to be switching gender—whether she’d considered that all this constituted a momentous breach with several thousand years of tyrannously inflexible social convention, especially concerning the behavior of marriageable girls. No doubt it had; she was well-informed and curious. She’d graduated from Vassar that summer and had a place lined up at Cornell for a masters in international relations. But she certainly wasn’t burdened by the knowledge. She had the aura of inhabiting an entirely benign cosmos that had always and ever been thus.

As if finally subdued by the combined effect of his daughter’s innocence and his girlfriend’s skepticism, Marco put down the paper and dropped the subject.

But later that morning, after they’d all left the house, he started up again, arguing that the condition of being “tarnished” was somehow intrinsically fascinating and worthy of study, and propounding, at some length, a theory that the older a man was, the more vulnerable he was to accusations of harassment, and the less likely to be given any benefit of the doubt, for the simple reason that it was repulsive to imagine older people having sex under any conditions at all.