“My first afternoon patient has canceled. I don’t have to be back in the office until one-thirty.” He smiled.

I couldn’t figure out why this was supposed to be such a nice surprise. I wonder why I couldn’t.

It was only after my husband stood up and drew me toward the bedroom that I realized what he had in mind. I wasn’t in the mood for it at all. I didn’t understand why I should have sex then. All I wanted was to get back to my book. I wanted to stretch out alone on the sofa and munch on chocolate while I turned the pages of Anna Karenina. All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully. He described them with wonderful precision. But that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally—

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips to my temple.

“I’m sorry, I’ve had a kind of headache all day. What awful timing.”

I had often had some truly terrible headaches, so he accepted my explanation without a murmur.

“You’d better lie down and get some rest,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“It’s really not that bad,” I said.

He relaxed on the sofa until one o’clock, listening to music and reading the paper. And he talked about dental equipment again. You bought the latest high-tech stuff and it was obsolete in two or three years…. So then you had to keep replacing everything…. The only ones who made any money were the equipment manufacturers—that kind of talk. I offered a few clucks, but I was hardly listening.

After my husband went back to the office, I folded the paper and pounded the sofa cushions until they were puffed up again. Then I leaned on the windowsill, surveying the room. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why wasn’t I sleepy? In the old days, I had done all-nighters any number of times, but I had never stayed awake this long. Ordinarily, I would have been sound asleep after so many hours or, if not asleep, impossibly tired. But I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. My mind was perfectly clear.

I went into the kitchen and warmed up some coffee. I thought, Now what should I do? Of course, I wanted to read the rest of Anna Karenina, but I also wanted to go to the pool for my swim. I decided to go swimming. I don’t know how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the limit. Purge it—of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of what?

I didn’t know.