“Anyway, we’ve been telling Lacey all about you, your work, all that you’re doing.” Shamelessly, Rebecca lowered her jeans and sat on the toilet. I pulled the door closed. She kept talking. “I’m so proud of you! So many people talk about making a difference, but you’re making a difference!”

“Oh, I don’t know.” But I smiled because it was true.

A woman hooted in the back room. Other women cheered.

“What’s going on back there?” I said.

“How many have you had?” Rebecca called out from the bathroom.

“Margaritas? I’m working on my second.”

“You may want to finish it before you go back there. That would be my advice.”

The door to the back room swung open, and Claudia poked her head out. “Rebecca, get your butt in here! Oh, Kate, just in time. I want you to meet Lacey. She’s a wr—”

“Rebecca was just saying.”

“But first, hurry, you two. Intermission is almost over.”

In the back room of the Valentine duplex, a state-of-the-art home entertainment system had been installed to project movie-theater-equivalent images on a large flat screen. Speakers hung in all four corners gave the viewer a Dolby-surround-sound feel.

Dan the Bear was a movie buff. He loved John Ford westerns, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, and he had a particular passion for the disaster films from the seventies, Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake.

What the girls were watching that night probably was not what Dan the Bear had in mind. Bend Over Boyfriend had been more instructional. I knew this because Claudia had drunkenly shouted it in my ear. “It was more educational. We learned about the anatomy. How much lubricant!”

She said lubricant in such a way that it was as if she’d been waiting her whole life to say the word. In fact, she kept saying lubricant or lube or the verb form, lubricate, as she got me up to speed.

“This sex therapist and her not-too-shabby husband have made this video series where women fuck their men. We already watched the first one. It was all about the mechanics, the anatomy of the asshole, some terrific foreplay techniques.” Claudia inserted the evening’s second DVD. Then she continued, like an announcer at a sporting event, “These are real people. Real husbands and wives. Real girlfriends and boy-friends. This isn’t porn for porn’s sake. It’s educational. It’s instructive.” She held up the laminated case. “Unlike most sequels, Bend Over Boyfriend Two is better than the original.” She read the blurb on the back of the box: “ ‘More Rockin’, Less Talkin’.’”

Lacey, the Wall Street Journal reporter, cozied up next to me with a joint in her hand. “What you’re doing sounds incredible.”

“Yes, I think it is—I mean, it could be. We’re a young foundation.”

“Tell me about it.”