The baby lurches and grabs Tamar’s finger. It really is eerie, she thinks, the way this nameless child brought into existence from a combination of Shlomi’s sperm, the egg of Dan’s sister, the womb and sweat of a Nepali woman, and a dash of fairy dust, looks the spitting image of their father. How did it work?

But, all the same, she isn’t having it. Her cantankerous father has not regrouped in Nepal to send back to them a beneficent message. Eli would have had plenty to say about it all, and it wouldn’t have been pretty. Eli, the doyen of Israeli shlumpadik, who wore baggy cargo pants and the same shirts until the buttons fell off, who had no feel for the elegance of math, would have crushed the Husband’s brown hat in one hand and told him what he could do with his jam and his Erdős.

Prying her finger loose from the baby’s grip, she passes him off to Iris, who takes him onto her chest as if she knows exactly what to do with babies, having been one herself. Tamar goes over to the plate-glass window and looks out at the sea. Had she stayed in Israel, she might have woken each day to a view like this, one that went all the way out to the horizon. But instead she went to New York to do her PhD, married David, and somewhere along the way lost her sense of expansiveness. It wasn’t David’s fault any more than it was her own. She had simply arrived too late to the conversation that might have made clear to her the many unconsidered possibilities. To listen to her patients in their twenties and thirties, monogamy was a great beached whale, its bloated, rotten carcass stinking to high hell, and the sooner one got away from it, the better. Whether the wave of polyamory they were all trying to ride would ever really carry anyone, or whether jealousy and the horror of instability would always sink them, Tamar couldn’t say. Look at Shlomi: he has ridden the high crest of free love, has loved and been loved by all of Mykonos and Ibiza, but in the end he wanted what everyone has wanted for as long as people have been remembering themselves—how did the poem go? Not universal love, but to be loved alone.