"Love can be a happy affair or a source of impenetrable sadness. For eight New Yorkers, the love they find is never what they expect. Shirley Abbott brilliantly dissects those tangled relationships. And what a messy knot it is: Maggie loves her husband, Mark, but wishes he weren't unemployed. Mark has little to do these days but rendezvous with his lover, Sophie. That she happens to be his daughter's nursery school teacher is unfortunate. Maggie is also in the dark about her recently widowed mother's affair with Sam, a famous publisher. Sam's wife, Edith, is more concerned about derailing plans for her granddaughter's commitment ceremony. Edith doesn't believe in same-sex love; well, according to Sam, Edith doesn't believe in sex at all. Which may be why Sam in spending so much time at Antonia's Greenwich Village apartment." "As the ground under them is literally shaken in September of 2001, each member of this urban ensemble will have to rethink his or her complicated domestic arrangements - and begin to look at the future in new ways."--BOOK JACKET