One by one, Nina managed to sleep with every man—fat, thin, tall, short, hairy, and bald—at the advertising firm where she worked. It wasn’t something that she planned, and it wasn’t something of which she was either proud or ashamed. Like much of life, including her brief marriage to a man who played the theremin, it just happened.

It started with Jim at last year’s office Christmas party—there’d been chemistry between them from day one—and not long afterward followed Tim. Tim with the rather old-fashioned Ray Bradbury glasses, whose name just happened to rhyme with Jim. Then Perry—an Australian by birth—and Will, and Mark—uncircumcised—and Glen, whose fling with Lucy was not yet old news then. There was no pattern to the incidents—it wasn’t one a week, or one a month, or only on Wednesday nights when the moon was full—and Nina considered herself merely finely attuned to recognizing opportunities when they arose.

Some of the office men had wives—it was the same old story; these were women who didn’t understand their men—and sometimes Nina imagined a situation in which she had to face their collective scorn. A Christmas party—like the one at which she’d slept with Jim, who wasn’t married then—could very quickly lose all sense of merriment. But the men had all devoured her, so why not give their wives a chance?