I listened with my usual noncommittal expression. As I said, I wasn’t required to agree or disagree, just to provide him with an audience. Also, I genuinely didn’t know what I thought. My opinions about these cases were as unstable as his, lurching between an icy willingness to condemn every accused man without further questioning, and what appeared to be a perverse, atavistic loyalty to the patriarchy that would take hold of me like a temporary seizure, and from which I would emerge stunned at myself. I didn’t trust any of them.

The documentary idea seemed to fade, but Marco’s agonizings over the subject persisted. They dominated our conversations at dinner when we went out after my class. And they were what prompted him into dragging himself across town for events such as that talk at the Irving Foundation, on rape and memory.

After the talk ended, Marco and I took the subway back to Brooklyn. We discussed the presentation for a while. Marco made a caustic comment about the slide show, likening the installations to the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and from there we got onto the topic of a new phenomenon I’d noticed among students—namely, a growing reluctance to discuss anything to do with sex.

“They’ll fall into this embarrassed silence whenever I raise the subject, which is problematic, since that’s what drives most of literature.”

“Sex?”

“Well, sex and money. Death too, though death they’re okay with, especially if it has to do with female character sacrifice, which is something they can get righteously indignant about. Money’s tricky since characters who have any are presumed a priori to be villains, which makes nonsense out of most nineteenth-century novels. But sex is impossible. They’ll just clam right up, and if you try to draw them out, you start feeling like some pervy creep in a park.”