Point, Click, Love by Molly Shapiro Page A

saw … accidentally … a list … all from Deirdre!”
    “And did you read any of them?”
    “No, I wouldn’t do that.”
    “You wouldn’t. Great. So you see a list and make assumptions,” said Jake, regaining his calm. “Well, maybe if you had read them, you’d see that they are completely innocent.”
    “Why are you texting her?”
    “Because that’s the way she likes to communicate! She’s young—”
    “Yes, very.”
    “And she prefers texting. So we text.”
    “About what?”
    “About patients!”
    “Really,” said Maxine sarcastically. Since when do doctors consult each other via texting? she thought.
    “Yes, really.” Jake pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket, pressed a few buttons, and handed it to Maxine. “Why don’t you read them?”
    Maxine took the phone and clicked on a message randomly. “IBS” was all it said. Completely ignorant of the secret language of texting, Maxine wondered what IBS could possibly mean. I be sad? I be sleepy? I be sexy?
    “IBS,” she said angrily, pretending that she knew exactly what that meant and had caught him in the act.
    “Right,” said Jake. “Irritable bowel syndrome. Next?”
    Frustrated, Maxine threw the phone into Jake’s lap. “Just leave me alone, Jake,” she said.
    She climbed the stairs, went into her oldest daughter Abby’s room, and threw herself on the bed facedown. More than anything, she wished she and Jake were not alone in the house. She thought about going and collecting her children from their various sleepovers and installing them in their rooms but quickly realized she couldn’t do that at midnight.
    Of course Jake had a logical explanation for his texts with Deirdre, thought Maxine. He had a logical explanation for everything. He was a doctor, after all. So rational and logical. It made Maxine sick. Deep down, she felt that all the explanations about why they didn’t have sex and why he was heavily texting a gorgeous, young, brilliant colleague were covering up what was really wrong with their marriage. Maxine had always thought of herself as smart and perceptive and intuitive, but she couldn’t figure this one out. Jake was stonewalling her, thought Maxine. He was hiding something. Now she was finally ready to find out what it was.
    M axine and Jake almost never fought, and in their twenty years together, they had never slept in separate beds while under the same roof. But after that night, Maxine could not bring herself tosleep next to Jake. So after the kids went to bed, she closed herself in her studio to work and fell asleep on the futon in the corner. When the kids asked why she was sleeping in her studio, she told them she had to work late for a new exhibit and didn’t want to wake up Daddy when she came to bed in the middle of the night.
    Rather than working, Maxine spent most of her time on the computer, perusing her favorite gossip sites, paying particular attention to the articles about cheating spouses. She noticed how whenever a “news” outlet reported that a star was having an affair, a vociferous denial always followed, with a representative assuring everyone that the star was still happy and devoted to their partner. Then weeks, even months later, it would eventually come out that the cheating really did happen and the star really was leaving their beloved. Maxine couldn’t understand why people needed to prolong the inevitable, why they needed to deny the truth. She figured that when someone was caught cheating, it was simply human nature to leap to one’s own defense and fight the charges.
    For that reason, she concluded that Jake’s denial was completely meaningless. And so she decided to take her investigation elsewhere, to the other source of the possible affair: Deirdre.
    Maxine knew that Jake and his colleagues frequented a particular coffee shop when they needed a break, so one morning she took her computer there and sat down, determined to wait until Deirdre showed up. She chose a day