Dating is Murder Read Free Page A

math a little challenging.”
    Carlito had stopped listening and was checking out the menu.
    “Cut,” Bing said. “Okay, I’ve got some usable stuff. Let’s bring in the doctor.”
    Following the Biographical Question, each
Biological Clock
episode featured an expert in the parenting field who raised hot-button issues that helped the viewing audience assess our parenting potential. The show wasn’t big with the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old demographic, but it had once won its time slot with whatever twenty-five- to forty-nine-year-old women were awake at that hour, which Bing liked to point out, in case this was as compelling to anyone else as it was to him.
    Paul escorted to our table a fiftyish man in a good suit, who smiled broadly and shook hands all around. “Daniel Exeter. Hi. Sorry I’m late, I had an ectopic pregnancy to deal with.”
    “Where’s your lab coat?” Bing asked. “Paul, didn’t you tell him to bring a lab coat?”
    Daniel Exeter looked taken aback. “It’s in the car, but as I told Paul, it’s not something I wear outside the clinic and—”
    “It’s all about visuals, Dan. Raises your IQ thirty points and establishes credibility, which is what TV is all about. Get it for him, Paul.”
    The doctor fished a valet-parking stub out of his pocket. “Porsche Carrera.”
    Paul took off at a trot. Bing eased himself out of the booth and said, “Right in here, Dan, opposite our stars. What are you drinking? Sake?”
    “It’s Daniel, actually. A glass of white wine will be fine.”
    “Too gay; let’s go with Scotch rocks. And forget first names. To us, you’re ‘Doctor.’ ”
    Bing got us situated. Paul came back with Dr. Exeter’s lab coat, its Westside Fertility logo visible on the breast pocket. Joey, helping out, adjusted a light on a tripod and nodded to Fredreeq, standing by with a compact of pressed powder. As a former actress, Joey always knew what was going on ten minutes before Fredreeq and I did. Isaac, his ears covered with headphones, moved in with his boom, a large, fur-covered microphone on a broomstick.
    Bing had Carlito ask the doctor which was better, sex or artificial insemination.
    “Is anything better than sex?” Dr. Exeter asked. “Sorry, little joke. For the average couple trying to conceive, sex works just fine. However”—here he glanced at me—“when a woman enters the winter of her reproductive life, that fact becomes a fertility issue.”
    “Go ahead, Dan, ask her how old she is,” Bing said. “No, don’t look at me—never look at the camera. Look at Wollie. The girl.”
    Dr. Exeter turned back to me. “How old are you, Wollie?”
    “I’m—”
    “No, don’t tell him, Wollie,” Bing said. “Say something coy.”
    Behind him, Joey rolled her eyes. I said, “Actually, I don’t mind telling—”
    “Wollie! Just say, ‘I’d rather not say.’ ”
    “I—I’d rather not say,” I said, hating myself for not being able to come up with something snappier. Also for setting feminism back a few years.
    “All right,” Dr. Exeter said, “let’s assume you’re a senior citizen, in ovarian terms. Late thirties, early forties.” He leaned back and took a sip of his Scotch, then made a face. “Adoption, surrogacy, donor eggs, surrogacy
and
donor eggs, these are all options for late-in-life mothers. Trying to do it yourself at that point is a long, heartbreaking proposition. A thirty-five-year-old woman is fifty percent less likely than a twenty-year-old to conceive unassisted. A forty-year-old has a one in fifteen chance each month. At forty-five, you’re like a vegan trying to contract mad cow disease.”
    “But what about—” I said.
    “Yes, we all know exceptions—the Irish Catholic neighbor who keeps churning them out, the grandmother who gets knocked up—but those are anomalies. And the movie stars you hear about? Probably not using their own eggs, not if they’re over forty, but who’s going to cop to that in