He disappeared through the crowded market to the far end where the café and the wineshop were. This was a Tuesday morning, unusually warm for March, which had a habit of hitting Washington with a fresh blast of winter, as if to remind us that the season wasn’t over yet, not without one last bang. My head told me to run out the side door, forgetting the cheese, and hop the next train back home. Or anywhere. My feet disobeyed and remained glued to the floor. And then he was back, another bag added to the collection of groceries he’d already purchased.

“Meet me in the Eighth Street alley in ten minutes,” was all he said.

Officially, premarital and extramarital sex were illegal. They’d always been illegal in most states, a holdover from the days of pre–Middle Ages sodomy laws that forbade even a married couple from engaging in anything other than vaginal intercourse. “Immoral” and “unnatural” were the benchmarks. Rarely was anyone charged and criminalized for fellatio or anal play, though, and affairs outside the marital bed were regarded as normal, if not commendable, acts.

And birth control? That’s a good one. The pharmacy shelf that used to hold Trojan and Durex and LifeStyles boxes is stocked with baby food and diapers. A logical replacement.

Reverend Carl had a few things to say about sexual morality when he rose to his current seat of power. No elections were held, no confirmation hearings—the president wanted votes, and he got them. All Sam Myers needed to do was listen to an unofficial right-hand man, a man with the attentive ears of millions who thought moving one hundred years in reverse was actually desirable.

Blessed be the loophole.

I don’t know if there’s really an adultery wagon, but I do know what happened to Annie Wilson down the street when her husband called in the infraction. It was on television, a handful of days after my world changed.

Annie Wilson was a tart in housewife clothing—at least she dressed down when her husband was home. I expect she made a beeline for her wardrobe on Wednesday mornings after he left for work, and reversed the dolling-up process in early afternoon after the man in the old blue pickup started his truck and left for another week. They had an arrangement.

I shouldn’t call her a tart. I’m no better, and Annie’s husband was no Prince Charming. She’d been wanting to leave him for two years, and once he canceled her credit cards and stopped payments on her car, Annie might as well have been living in a maximum-security prison. One Wednesday, I remember cheering her on, silently urging her to just walk out of the house and get in that blue pickup and never look back.