She was beginning to lean backward, little by little, like an ocean liner sinking below the wave line, until she was lying prone on the bed.

“Do you have kids?” she asked suddenly.

“I don’t,” I said.

“Ever been married?”

“No.”

The guest lecturer muttered something into the bedspread, something that sounded like, “Lucky.”

“I have five,” she said, her voice suddenly distinct. “Kids.”

She was lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling, her feet in their pantyhose splayed in front of her at the end of the bed.

“My husband and I are both only children, and we thought growing up was a little lonely, you know? Let’s have a big family. Everyone will be friends.”

I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see me. The idea sounded reasonable enough.

She laughed darkly. “They all hate each other.”

I began to imagine the guest lecturer’s five children, sandy-haired like their mother, standing on the lawn outside their home in Colorado—and then I found I had no interest in imagining them at all.

“How about you?” she said, turning on the bedspread to face me, a maneuver which caused one of her breasts to pour out over the other, as if suffocating it.

“How about me what?”

“Do you have siblings?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “So you had a lonely childhood, too.”

I shrugged. I had never quite succumbed to the habit, so dear to the American heart, of casually trading confidences.

“What are your parents like?” she said doggedly. The question put a stop, temporarily, to my whirring thoughts, and I was unhappily transported to the last visit I had paid my mother, her room suffocatingly hot, and the nurse, cool and efficient, bringing me a piece of gauze and a wet washcloth for my nosebleed. It’s the desert air, the nurse had said. Pinch it here at the bone.

“That’s a funny question,” I said.

The guest lecturer raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I think it’s pretty standard.”

When I spoke again I felt my voice was coming through a little strangely, like a familiar song played just half an octave off.

“They were never married,” I said. “I grew up with my mother.”

“Oh,” said the guest lecturer. “In England?”

“In England,” I repeated.

This woman, I thought, feeling irritated, is nothing but a big distraction. I looked down at her supine form with distaste.

“Any more questions?”

I had spoken perhaps more harshly than I had intended. I came to the side of the bed and knelt down, so that she and I were at eye level. Her eyes widened and grew more alert.

“You look tired,” I said. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”

Her eyebrows raised questioningly. She was breathing audibly through her nose but did not speak.

“That’s right,” I said. “Go to sleep.”