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Mary Gallo?”
    “From your office.” Alex doesn’t remember this person at all but he knows how to lead the witness.
    “Yes. She’s an editor, cookbooks mainly. I can see by your face you don’t remember her—but you’ve met her.”
    “Of course I have,” Alex says. Most of the people with whom Leslie works are interchangeable to him, but nice, awfully nice.
    “Well, she and her partner just adopted. A little girl from Russia.”
    “Attachment disorder,” Alex says quickly.
    “What?”
    “A lot of the Russian kids have attachment disorder. They don’t bond.” He takes a sip of sake.
    “Alex. I want us to adopt. I’m sick of living this way. I’m tired of doctors, and diets, and I am most of all worried.” She senses Alex is about to say something but she stops him with a gesture. “I am worried about what this is doing to us . Our marriage. Our souls .”
    “There’s nothing wrong with our marriage or our souls,” Alex manages to put in.
    But Leslie is being carried by the force of all that she has kept pent up for months and she barely hears him. “I am sick of feeling like this, like a failure. I never want to hold my legs up like a beetle on its back after we have sex—it’s ridiculous.” She holds the sides of her head, as if to prevent an explosion. “I want our sex life to be about us. I want you to touch me because you love me and because you are attracted to me, not because I am ovulating, or am supposed to be ovulating according to the goddamned calendar and that horrible thermometer. I never want to see a calendar or a thermometer again. Ever. No, no.” She puts up her hands as if Alex is about to interrupt, though by now he has decided to sit silently, let her vent, let the steam blow off. “I want a calendar, but full of dinner dates, and theater tickets, and meeting friends for drinks at the Sherry—remember? Remember our life together? What it used to be like? When was the last time we had dinner with people? When was the last time I had an orgasm?” She sees Alex’s eyes widen. “I’m sorry, Alex. I don’t even fake them anymore. At this point I’m like a clump of dirt waiting for the farmer to shove a seed in me.” She reaches for his hand. “I used to be so sexy, Alex. With you. I was just blazing. You turned me on so much. And I want that back. We’re not getting any younger, we’re not going to live forever, and I don’t want to waste any more of our time.”
    “May I speak now?” Alex says.
    “I want you to,” she says softly.
    “Well, first of all, I take it that the remark about our not getting any younger primarily concerns me. Now that my fiftieth birthday is in sight. Though I must say, it feels more as if the fiftieth birthday has me in its sights, like in the crosshairs.”
    “No one gets younger, Alex. Life is a one-way street.”
    “Well… yes. That’s true. But you’re still a very young woman, and in a few years you’re still going to be young, and you’re still going to be beautiful—and young enough to be a mother. You get to my age, the pace quickens. I think you begin to age four years for every actual year, at a certain point. My time is running out.”
    “Your time is never going to run out with me.”
    “I repeat: my time is running out.”
    “Alex…”
    “Jim Johnson came to my office today, Leslie.”
    Leslie falls silent. She drinks her sake and holds out her cup for Alex to refill.
    “And?” she asks in a small voice.
    “And now he is an attorney at Bailey, Twisden, Kaufman, and Chang.”
    “So he told you the name of their miracle doctor, I gather,” Leslie says.
    “Yes, he did. Dr. Kis, and he’s in Ljubljana.”
    “Where?”
    “Lub. Yan. Na. Ljubljana.”
    “Thanks for the lesson, Alex. Now you want to tell me where the hell that is?” Things seem to be moving along without her; she doesn’t care to be a passenger on the SS Alex as it steams across the ocean of life.
    “Slovenia, beautiful Slovenia.” He