The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman

maybe a piece of pie later.
    â€œNothing to drink?” asked the waitress.
    â€œShe’s a doctor,” said Ray. “No drinking when she’s on call.”
    â€œWe get a lot of doctors here,” said the waitress, and cocked her head in the direction of my hospital.
    When she’d gone, I said, “I’m not on call. You don’t have to make up excuses.”
    â€œYou know why I do that? I’m just so friggin’ proud that you’re a doctor. I guess I look for any occasion to announce it.”
    If it weren’t for his previously announced emotional distress, I might have said that I took exception to his use of the adjective
proud
—that it was a word for parents, for teachers, for mentors; for one’s own self to admit in the privacy of one’s head. “We’ve discussed this before,” I said, “but maybe I need to say it again: I’d prefer that you didn’t lie.”
    â€œLie?” he repeated. “Because I tell the waitress you’re on call? Isn’t that true? Don’t you work around the clock? Didn’t you work all day today and aren’t you going back there at dawn?”
    â€œPretty much,” I said.
    â€œOkay. That’s settled: no lie.” He smiled as the waitress delivered his frosted mug. “After the day I’ve had, you wouldn’t believe how good this looks,” he said to her.
    She said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of day did you have?”
    â€œYou tell her,” Ray prompted me.
    â€œIt’s a personal matter—” I began.
    â€œConcerning my former wife, who was unfaithful the entire time we were married. With a guy she worked with. Who we even double-dated with.”
    â€œYou didn’t tell me that,” I said.
    â€œHe and his wife had us over for dinner once. The happy couple—him with his arm around her shoulders, nuzzling her hair and making jokes in bad taste about their empty nest, implying that they had sex whenever they felt like it, in every room.”
    â€œLate wife or ex-wife?” asked the waitress.
    â€œLate,” he said. “Car crash. Which until today I never even considered to be any kind of divine retribution.”
    â€œWhy would you,” I asked, “if you just found out tonight?”
    â€œMaybe I had my suspicions,” said Ray.
    The waitress took a step toward the kitchen. “I need to put your order in. Sorry.”
    I
was sorry I hadn’t pleaded fatigue and said good night at my door. I sat there, conversationally dry, ill-equipped to offer therapy of any kind. I tried to recall what my more psychologically astute fellow residents murmured at the bedsides of overwrought patients. “Is there anything I can do?” I heard myself ask.
    â€œYou mean it?”
    I hadn’t meant it. I had no idea what was on a menu of helpful things I could be recruited for. I said that as a doctor and someone who saw a lot of suffering and heard deathbed regrets—not true—I believed that the surviving spouse should forgive and forget.
    â€œExcept, Doc,” he said, “we’re not talking about one mistake, one slip-up. We’re talking about a wife screwing around every chance she got.”
    I took a sip of water, then asked, “Were you ever unfaithful to her?”
    â€œNever! Not once. And why would I? A middle-aged guy like me, nothing special to look at and not exactly a world-beater, who lucked into this relationship with a young and very hot lady.”
    I asked him to explain that—“lucked into.” How had they met?
    â€œAt work,” he said.
    â€œYours or hers?”
    â€œMine. At the Topsfield Fair. I was at my booth, and along comes this
really
good-looking girl in leather pants. I mean, like, exceptionally good-looking—long dark hair, big brown eyes, suede boots that came up past her knees—and she asked me for napkins because there’s horse