Carter listens to Meredith's plans for reconciliation, thinks mostly of Chase, but agrees to give it a whirl. Like most of the men in these stories, Carter is screamingly passive. Yet even the women who call the shots let life lead them by the hand. Things happen to people. The people, too tired or too drunk to fight back, go along for the ride.
Chance is destiny.
In the title story, an offhand comment changes the course of a man's life. And then he realizes that his young date is not interested in him sexually. The combination undoes him. It is Julian who has said this, to Lila. . . . But even as Lila smiles at his phrasing, at the implication of their being watchers rather than participants, in fact protagonists, she reflects that it could have been she herself who spoke.