Life

Book 189: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by Gwyneth Jones

Genres: Cyberpunk

Synopsis

Anna Senoz is a brilliant young scientist, working towards her PhD and a bright career when she makes a discovery that could change the world of genetics forever.

The 'Transferred Y' chromosome, however, isn't as welcomed by her peers, or the wider society. Anna is forced to choose between her dedication to her discovery, the progress of her career, and her responsibilities to her family. Does scientific integrity mean speaking out against the naysayers? Are the potential ramifications of her discovery too wide-reaching for her to risk pursuing it?

Winner of the 2004 Philip K. Dick award, Life examines society's fixation on biological sex, the struggles of women in STEM, and the pressures placed upon them by families, colleagues and friends alike. Perfect for fans of alternate histories and near-future feminist SFF, like The Handmaid's Tale and Vox.

Release date: February 17, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this “sex” except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that “sex” becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy.

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (5)

Gwyneth Jones’s rich and extraordinary Life strikes me as intensely bioscientific, not in the sense of fantastic reality but the deeper sense of genetic realism. Life is a fascinating example of near science fiction and some of the best feminist biogenomedical science fiction ever written. Moving from Darko Suvin’s famous definition of SF as ‘cognitive estrangement’, Jones makes the readers question about how much science in science fiction becomes a science reality by blurring the line between science fact and science fiction.

What makes Life original and so powerful is Jones’s skill of offering an alternative society without gender binary through the death of the male chromosome as a result of random mutation, which becomes a ‘genetic fossil’ (Life, 93) in our evolutionary past. Anna, a dedicated scientist inspired by cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock’s gene transposition, discovers the DNA of children with what she terms the ‘Transferred Y’ chromosome. She discovers that the X chromosome jumps to the part of the Y, causing the development of an infertile XX male chromosome: TY. The novel explores how jumping genes cause new mutations that drive the evolution of human sexuality. The Transferred Y chromosome, which is not a virus but a viroid (a smaller RNA agent, without a protein coating that can only infect plants – until the events of Life), offers the theory that species are part of ‘continuous creation,’ an alternative to Darwinian competitiveness, and makes us question ‘if we can be human without [gender]’ (Life, 350) through the disappearance of biological gender differences on the level of DNA.

One of the great strengths of this novel is Jones’s ability to reconceptualize what it means to be human without sex chromosomes, bringing the debate on gender binary codes and the fear of losing them into fiction but examining them through the lens of science within that. Life offers new insights and futuristic perspectives of genome medicine by realistically portraying multiple forms of sex and gender. Jones explores the anxieties and fears of a range of new sexes and the possibility posthuman existence that breaks the boundaries and dichotomies in a similar manner to Donna Haraway’s cyborgian or posthuman ideas, that as culturally created beings, ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’ (A Cyborg Manifesto, 581). Jones’s speculative genetic realism redefines sex (biology) and gender (sociocultural) by introducing a new perceived threat to society’s understanding of binary sex and gender and how they are linked.

Helen Parker, in her study Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction (1977), classifies two types of genetic or biological science fiction: either focusing on ‘the genetic accident’ or ‘the planned genetic alteration,’ both of which offer an evolutionary fiction (35). I would argue that Jones’s biogenomic medicine in Life offers an uncontrolled chromosomal future as a consequence of a genetic transformation of the Y chromosome. However, in contrast to the two versions put forward by Parker, this uncontrolled or unexpected biogenetical transformation is not a kind of merely accidental mutation or alteration caused by warfare, man, experimental laboratory fault, a radioactive fallout, or a natural disaster, but rather a kind of inevitable change of DNA beyond the control of man that leads the death of the binary sexes and birth of many alternative sexes. Jones presents a random discovery and demonstrates transformational evolutionary genetic motifs, exploring the idea of the constant and inevitable change of biology. Thus, I call Life a good representative of biogenomedical SF.

The loss of the male chromosome, the extinction of men, and the female-only world has been explored in a lot of feminist SF, including Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1890), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; hermaphrodite society), among many, many others. However Jones does not portray a Herland-esque single-sex utopia, but instead depicts a more realistic picture of the genetic probability of the natural emergence of alternative non-binary post-sexes beyond sexual dichotomy. As I mention in my article, ‘Violence Against Women in Science: The Future of Gender and Science in Gwyneth Jones’s Life’, Jones depicts ‘genderization of science’ by questioning whether there are essential biological sexual differences through the discovery of the TY chromosome, which de-restructures our gendered society, as sex is no longer a matter of the X or the Y. Life is a good exemplar of depicting the Y syndrome in all human beings sweeping away the debates over biological sex and socialized gender. Jones raises the question of what Life means without sex chromosomes in a more complex world, where multiple sexes might enable the battle of many sexes.

In Gwyneth Jones’s terms, feminist SF ‘propose[s] a future or, better, many diverse futures, where testosterone drives have been … substantially demoted’ and where diverse genders can live together (Deconstructing the Starships, 33). Life depicts genetic SF in an unusual way, opening a new path of biogenomedical science with many diverse sexes, which creates new social conflicts since ‘human sexuality will be changed’ and ‘create a situation where there are no generic traits exclusive to “men” or “women”: when the sexual difference is in the individual, not a case of belonging to one half of the species or the other’ (Life, 380). The novel explores the ideas of a ‘nuclear transfer child’ as a clone baby that parents can buy the trait for a color scheme out of a vanity-parenting catalog, and also of the ‘Transformationists’ as genetically transformed humans; the future of the human race who are born ‘with indetermined sex organs,’ or some others with ‘varied sexual orientation, confessed to being anatomically, or biologically, male or female’ (Life, 366). Referencing Brian Attebery’s claim that gender code ‘is rooted in biology but shaped by culture’ (3), Life’s TY chromosome generates new alternative codes of diverse sexes.

Another element of the book that could be considered science fiction is the portrayal of the central character, a woman and a scientist. In years gone by, the idea of women as scientists was a fiction in itself, dating back to Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called Blazing the Blazing World in 1666, and continuing through the years, Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), and Pamela Sargent’s Cloned Lives (1976) are just a few examples. Since the 1980s, feminist SF has redefined and recoded the patriarchal conceptualization of gender, science, technology, and genre. Life is a good critique of how women have traditionally neglected as main characters within SF, and within science itself. These works depict women’s invisible, unimaginable, impossible, undervalued work within science. Jones’s Life portrays our life, a realistic picture of the place of women scientists in all spheres, even in science fiction. Jones questions why, either in real or fictional life, women scientists have not had a lab of their own. Jones depicts what is at stake in the patriarchal control of science, and in women scientists’ place as side and minor characters in SF. Like other feminist SF authors, Jones creates alternative sciences by portraying women as subjects rather than objects in ever sphere of their personal and professional lives.

Getting it off my chest, as a woman academic, I feel Life’s realistic depictions of the patriarchal stereotypes and obstacles women academics/scientists face in science is both important and relevant. It presents a final, motivating vision of a successful but neglected woman scientist finding a room of her own, a lab of her own, and science of her own despite experiencing sexual harassment from a colleague, psychological pressure from her supervisor, even being raped by her classmate. Anna overcomes the patriarchal structures – both societal and professional – but the seriousness of these encounters is not downplayed, nor is it without cost.

It is not precisely made clear in the novel how Anna descends into madness, but as a haunted mad scientist, she portrays her struggle with her split roles as a scientist, a mother, and a wife stuck between her professional and personal lives. Jones draws Anna’s conflicted position as a woman, wife and mother in science in the shadow of Barbara McClintock, whose discovery of jumping genes was discredited for many years until she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine at the age of eighty-one. Anna’s discovery is also devalued until she succeeds in gaining the attention of the media with the publication of her research, but her rise to prominence is the reverse of McClintock’s: she is vilified, and she is declared a ‘sex destroyer’ (Life, 360). Anna’s success is a double-edged sword, as it impacts not only her professional but her personal life, and she is constantly being made to consider the balance of her scientific principles and her family’s needs.

Jones presents a realistic biogenomedical novum with the TY chromosome through a cognitively estranged reality of our transformational DNA. She neither offers a hopeful vision nor a disastrous one and leaves the novel open-ended, refusing to provide an easy solution to the role of woman in a society where gender is entirely constructed separately from biology. Life ultimately leaves the debate about whether genetic change/adaptation/editing will end the gender trouble or create another social gender inequality between the postgendered society unresolved.

Enjoy your Life!

Sümeyra Buran, Riverside, California
August 2021

Notes:

– Attebery, Brian (2002), Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Routledge.

– Buran, Sümeyra (2021), ‘Violence against Women in Science: The Future of Gender and Science in Gwyneth Jones’s Life’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62: 3, 268–253, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1803195

– Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York: Routledge.

– Jones, Gwyneth A., (1999), Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality, Liverpool University Press.

– Parker, Helen N. (1984), Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction. 1977. UMI Research.

– Suvin, Darko (1979), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, Yale University Press.

– Haraway, Donna J. (1990), “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Last Quarter,” in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader. Ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson. Philadelphia: Temple.

On an orphaned stretch of open trunk road, between the urban freeway system and the M6, they stopped at a garage to recharge. The night was warm. The trees in the hedge by the layby raised nets of blurred, dusty, dark branches against a neon-tinted grey sky. Spence went into the shop to pay. He could be seen brightly lit behind plate glass prowling the stacks, peering into the chill cabinet and moving slowly along the racked magazines, surreptitiously peeking at half-naked ladies. Anna decided that she wanted to drive. She got out of the car and stood on the blackened concrete, feeling the weight of the dull heat and the light-polluted clouds. As Spence returned a girl in a pink jacket and tattered jeans arrived on a petrol-engined motorcycle, her boyfriend riding pillion in a complete suit of black leathers. They drew up beside a German van and began to refuel. A nostalgic reek flooded the air, invoking hot road-movie nights in happier times. Spence and Anna had been travellers together for so long.

‘He must be sweaty in there,’ remarked Spence tentatively.

‘I want to drive.’

‘Are you okay to drive?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean anything.’ He held out his keys, with a wary smile. ‘Is it peace?’

She could see through the droop of his shoulders to the hostility he denied.

‘Sure,’ she said miserably. ‘Peace, why not.’ She ignored his offering, used her own keys and slid into the driver’s seat.

‘Shit,’ muttered Spence. ‘Christ—’ He slammed the passenger door and hunched beside her, fists balled against his forehead.

‘Daddy said the s-word,’ Jake murmured, pleased. ‘Did you get me anything?’

‘Not this time babes,’ said Anna. ‘But we’re going to stop at a Services.’

‘In the middle of the night?’ The child’s sleepy voice woke up, fired with enthusiasm. Jake loved midnight pit-stops.

‘In the middle of the night,’ she agreed.

‘And have ice cream?’

‘We’ll have whatever we like.’

Anna had lost her job. She had lost plenty of jobs without feeling much pain. Short term contracts end and are not renewed: there is no stigma. It’s the business. But this was different. It was her own fault, it was because she had started to work on ‘Transferred Y’ again. Spence had been making money at last. Anna had thought she was free to stretch her wings, to do something a prudent breadwinner couldn’t contemplate. She’d known there would be some flak when she published her results, maybe a weird science paragraph or two in the papers. She’d been totally unprepared for the catastrophe that had descended upon her. There was no one to understand. Not her parents, who had taken out an option against bad news. Not her sister (you must be joking). Not Spence, least of all Spence. He said he could not see what her problem was. If she never worked again, which was her overwrought prediction, they weren’t going to starve. Why was she so upset? We’re talking Anna Senoz here, not Marie Curie. She’d been one of the worker bees, footslogger in a lab coat. Now she was one of the unemployed. Why not? In case you hadn’t noticed, it happens to a lot of people.

For fuck’s sake, it isn’t the end of the world. What makes you so special?

The fact that it was my life.

The fact that you love me.

Anna had said the first of these things. Not the second, because if you have to say that, it is already useless; since then they had not been friends.

It was strange to visit them and see her parents settling into a late bloom of prosperity. Treats, indulgences, new possessions. She felt glad for them but uneasy, as if they had given up her childhood’s religion. No car, though. They were true to the old code in that: still acting the way everybody should, but didn’t. Still doing the right thing.

The Motorway. They bowled across the wide confusing pan of the interchange: no lanes, headlights coming from all directions, the monstrous freight rigs blazing, bearing down on you like playground bullies, like street gangs, the only thing to do is not be in the way. Anna set her teeth and kept her line, up to one of the automatic gates. They were through, into hyperspace, into the video screen. Suddenly it was fully dark, all solid outlines had disappeared. The road world was made of lights, a rushing void between the unreeling double strands of scarlet and silver, amber and viridian, brakelights in front, headlights streaming towards her in the northbound lanes. Could be anywhere. It should be anywhere, a nameless country outside time and space, but somehow the road was not anonymous. She could sense that tired, familiar sky still overhead: skinny ragged hank of an island, hardly wider than the traffic lanes that braided it up and down.

Oh, but she truly loved this effortless glide through hyperspace. She loved the disembodied concentration that floated up in her: overtake, recover your lane, gear change up, gear change down. Never wanted an automatic or an autopilot what a cissy idea, get a machine to eat your dinner and fuck for you next. This was a state of grace, hurtling at 130 kilometres an hour (habitual law breaker, like practically every British driver); and then every so often you’d do something wrong, a lapse of concentration or slight misjudgement, a jolt: speed up, dodge, drop back, whew, safe again. Lovely, lovely.

Until, inevitably, they hit a slow patch.

For years now they’d been making this trip, up to Manchester for Anna’s mother’s birthday. Always ended up doing it on a holiday weekend. Always ended up caught in traffic. When they visited Spence’s mother in Illinois, Loulou would insist they didn’t have to leave the night before their flight home: cue panic on the freeway, stacked like doughnuts in a box; and Spence’s mother’s rapture about the gashog-heaven to O’Hare descanting into an aggrieved wail: it’s never like this! For the Goddess’s sake, it is barely five am! Anna glanced at the Routemaster prompt, faintly hoping for an alternative. But if there was any escape, it wouldn’t know. It was dying, they ought to replace the chip but they wouldn’t because they were planning to give up private vehicle ownership. Thus, clinging to the destructive habit we resort to stupid tricks, essentially punishing the car itself: like an unhappy woman who punishes her own body, poor innocent animal, by failing to groom, by dressing drably; by feeding or starving it into physical distress.

Stop that. Don’t think bad thoughts.

She kept her distance; three cars instantly elbowed into her sensible gap. She accepted fate: settled into the nose to tail routine, along with the people on either side, and in front and behind for however many miles. It was as if they were all sitting, each of them staring reservedly straight ahead, on the banks of seats in some giant aircraft, doing odd calisthenics to stave off muscle atrophy on a long, long flight through the dark.

Those economy-class long haul flights, in the days when Anna and Spence used to travel the world: chasing short-term science jobs for Anna, in exotic locations. Those airports, the battered transfer lounges where the aircon gave up long ago, the ragged carpets soaked in an icy sweat of condensation, the tumbledown vinyl furniture. The rumour that passes as if through a herd of animals, so that first one or two and then a few people hover by the desk: and then there’s a surge, an unstoppable rush of bodies that everybody has to join, but which is completely pointless. Someone in a neat uniform peeps around the glass doors and hurriedly retreats, clutching a mobile phone. The people in uniforms are terrified of the crowd. Therefore they put off as long as possible the awful moment when they’ll have to admit that they don’t have enough seats. Actually the plane was full when it left Lagos/Abu Dhabi/Karachi/Singapore, because though all of you here have tickets and you confirmed and reconfirmed your onward bookings, the passengers at the point of origin have the advantage: and there are always more passengers. Always. So they wait and they keep us waiting, in the fear that lies behind unthinking cruelty – as if hoping that some of us will decide, having come out to the dead no-man’s-land of the airport and suffered here for sixteen hours on a whim, just to while away the time, that we don’t want to go home to London or Paris or New York after all.

We make small alliances, we look for people who look like ourselves; or failing that for people with whom we share a language. Then there’s an announcement: our flight will be leaving from a different gate. We all leap up and run, abandoning any semblance of solidarity. Maybe some of us will fall by the wayside, or accidentally rush through a door to the outside, and have to start again with Immigration and Passport Control Hell. Maybe some of us will be trampled to death. Maybe that’s what everybody’s hoping for: that the numbers will be winnowed down, until we, the survivors, are secure. But at every round window of the plane that sits out there in the night on the hot, wet, tarmac (these scenes always happen in the dark) there gleams a pair of listless, patient eyes. It’s worse than we thought. It’s not that there is not enough room for the whole crowd. There is no room at all. There is no drinking water, and the toilets don’t work any more. Oh no, it won’t do. There’s no excuse, not even the thin illusion that you are doing good. If you don’t have the moral bottle to take a two week package tour to The Gambia for fun and sun in a razor-wired and guarded compound, which you’ll only leave to visit the crocodiles by armoured personnel carrier (Sorry, crocodile. Sorry, we know there was one alive last year. We’ll change the information in the brochure very shortly, honest). Then you should stay at home. Don’t worry. The experience you seek will soon come to find you.

Soon come.

Soon come.

When she was a little girl, Anna had been frightened when she found out that her grandfather Senoz (who was dead) had been born a Jew. He’d eloped with a Catholic girl, something his family took so hard the couple had decided to leave Spain, and start again in England. It was supposed to be a romantic story. In Anna’s childish mind the word Jew triggered an image of a great crowd of people shuffling along, dressed in black and white and shades of grey, towards a destination that obviously terrified them but they couldn’t turn back. Where are they taking us, mummy? I don’t know. Sssh.

& Here we are again, shuffling along, heads down, packed like frightened sheep …

The road folds in on itself. Sssh, don’t ask where it leads.

The bad thoughts kept coming back, taking any shape they could find. She glanced at her husband. He seemed to be asleep, or if not asleep he was avoiding her as best he could, inside a moving car. Spence wake up, talk to me, I’m drowning.

She was no stranger to the harsh realities of her profession. Getting fired was nothing really. The problem was Transferred Y, this outrage about Transferred Y: as if Anna physically embodied the phenomenon, and was being whipped and driven from the herd as a scapegoat. She wasn’t to blame, she’d done nothing wrong, so why did she feel so broken, so desperate? She needed to understand. If she understood her own feelings, maybe she could deal with them. Her menfolk slept. Reluctantly, ruefully, her thoughts turned to the person who used to have all the answers: Anna in the long ago. Staring ahead of her, the silence of memory brimming behind her closed lips, she began to tell herself a story.

For a long time, I used to share a bedroom with my sister …

For a long time Anna used to share a bedroom with her sister. They were close in age, incompatible in temperament. Anna was fifteen months older: stoical, reserved, well-behaved and single-minded. Margaret was a creature of enthusiasms, with a flaring temper and quick resentment of any authority-figure. When they were small they were often happy together: by the time Anna was ten Margaret’s very presence could fill her with despair. She marked her half of their space with string and tape and begged her sister to respect the law. Margaret took up the challenge energetically, so that whenever Anna opened a drawer, looked for a dress in their shared wardrobe, took a book from her bookshelf she found defiant spoor: torn and scribbled pages, missing toys, clothes tried out, dropped, stepped on and left in a grubby, fingered heap among the shoes.

Anna’s bed was the one by the window, by right of primogeniture. When she came upstairs, an hour later than Margaret, (their parents, pining for child-free time, had tried sending the sisters off together: they’d had to give up the idea), she would pull the curtain round her and sit with a torch and her library book as if crouched in a cave – a mountain between herself and the hateful sound of her sister’s breathing; the entrance of her refuge facing through chill glass into the night. Out in the dark there lived another girl. She was Anna’s reflection, but there must have been a time when Anna genuinely didn’t know this because some of the mystery of the impossible had survived. The other girl floated in space: cold, windwashed, barefoot, marvellously free. She was both an ideal sister and an ideal Anna. She was closure. Between the shell of the reflection and the shell of her own body Anna was poised, safe in her own territory, her privacy ensured. It did not occur to her to make up adventures for the wild girl, or to invent imaginary conversations. She would simply look up from time to time from her reading, to meet the bright eyes of the other. They would smile at each other. The wild girl vanished at last when Anna was fourteen, which was when her parents had the loft converted and the two girls were able to have a bedroom each. She was not entirely forgotten. It was because of her that Anna, usually so levelheaded, had the curious impression – which she confessed to nobody – that she had invented Ramone Holyrod the night when they first met: called up this mischievous, erratic guardian spirit from nothing and darkness, with a past and circumstances all complete.

It happened like this. Anna was wandering the campus alone, in the middle of the night. This was supposed to be dangerous for a female undergraduate. Anna, accustomed to street life on an inner-Manchester estate where the Rottweilers went around in pairs, saw no reason for alarm. Her sister had been staying for the weekend, sleeping on Anna’s floor; it had been a strain. Her mind was buzzed and bruised from lack of sleep, but either her room or her head was still full of Maggie (still Margaret in Anna’s interior monologue, for old time’s sake), so she had been forced to come out for a midnight stroll. She was trespassing at the Arts end of the campus. Owing to savage prejudice on the part of the planners the grass was literally greener down here, because there was more of it. The library was here, (do they think we can’t read?); and the great beech trees that Anna loved. Light from uncurtained windows; security lights along the paths and roads, filled the dark valley, but when she looked away from them the sky above her was cobalt clear and bitten by more stars than you ever saw in inner Manchester.

She had been stupid enough to confide that she was in love.

‘Do you sleep with him?’ demanded Margaret.

‘It’s not like that. We’re friends, we’re in the same … social group, I suppose. He … he isn’t interested.’

She must learn that you didn’t have to answer those kind of questions. You could ignore them, or change the subject, or lie. Everybody did it.

Margaret snorted. ‘You don’t have to wait for him to be interested. Make him an offer. Men will fuck anything, the pigs. Didn’t you see that thing on the news last week, a ninety-three year old great-grandmother gang-raped by a bunch of thirteen year olds? Or something like that. It’s always happening. I don’t mean to be crude but if she can get some, what is your problem? Offer sex, you don’t have to worry about anything else. He’ll fuck you once, he’ll fuck you twice, he’ll get used to the idea, you become a habit and bingo!’ Margaret waved her hand in the gloom of Anna’s sleeping cell, spreading the fingers daintily. ‘The engagement ring!’

‘You’re nuts,’ muttered Anna from her bed, wishing to God being drunk made Margaret fall asleep like a normal person.

‘What d’you say?’

‘I’m going to sleep.’

If Margaret was right about the way things had to be between men and women, then Anna wanted no part of the business. The idea that you could carry on in such bad faith to the point of marrying someone was disgusting. Margaret said they expected nothing else, wouldn’t understand if you were honest. Anna couldn’t believe that the boys, the men, she knew, were really like that. Straightforwardness and fair-dealing must be better. It only needed somebody to make the first move. If it was true that human beings were the helpless puppets of their sex hormones, then why didn’t Anna herself have six children by this time? Surely men must be human as well as sexual, same as women? Surely they must be … Suppose Margaret was right? Anna shuddered. Then too bad, she would stay celibate her life long.

Can’t play, won’t play!

Getting married young was crap anyway. When she married – if she married, it wasn’t essential – it would be at the end of an extended and intense single life, and with somebody she had met long after this callow apprenticeship. The cold kiss of dew on her bare ankles, she lifted her face to gaze at the stars: distracted by reasoned argument and comforted by exquisite dreams. The house in the country where she and Rob would live together. Their cats, their dogs, their two children. As she approached one of the beeches, a solitary tree that she regarded as her particular refuge, a dart of anguish pierced her: he doesn’t love me and he never will.

It was the truth. She could read the game-board, she knew her hopes were doomed. She could see the other couples moving together, possible or probable configurations: not Anna with Rob. Either he had a girlfriend elsewhere, though he’d never mentioned one, or he was gay and shy about letting people know; or (most likely) he simply did not want to do it with Anna. These things happen at fir