The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Elinor Lipman
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
A NOVEL
Dedication
For Mameve Medwed,
dear and exemplary friend
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1: Tell the Truth
2: Later Classified as Our First Date
3: Leo Frawley, RN
4: We Entertain
5: A.k.a. the Transportation
6: Alice Makes Up Her Own Mind
7: Reveille
8: Leo’s House
9: Née Mary Ciccarelli
10: I (Nearly) Kill Someone
11: Now What Do I Do?
12: Clarification
13: Ms. Bravado
14: I’m a Normal Person
15: Advanced Social Outreach
16: Slow-Normal
17: Venues Not Available to Me
18: The Life of the Party
19: The Annals of Surgery
20: Saturday Night
21: Social Work
22: I Move On
23: Here Comes the Bride
24: Hiatus
25: Do It for Dr. Thrift
26: Plan A
27: The Opposing Argument
28: The Wife-Bride
29: We’re Engaged
30: A Free Woman
31: Alice Thrift, A.D.
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Life at a Glance
Top Eleven Favourite Books
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A Critical Eye
Who’s Sorry Now?
Q & A
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1 Tell the Truth
YOU MAY HAVE seen us in “Vows” in The New York Times: me, alone, smoking a cigarette and contemplating my crossed ankles, and a larger blurry shot of us, postceremony, ducking and squinting through a hail of birdseed. We didn’t have pretty faces or interesting demographics, but we had met and married in a manner that was right for SundayStyles: Ray Russo came to my department for a consultation. I said what I always said to a man seeking rhinoplasty: Your nose is noble, even majestic. It has character. It gives you character. Have you thought this through?
The Times had its facts right: We met as doctor and patient. I digitally enhanced him, capped his rugged, haunted face with a perfect nose and symmetrical, movie-star nostrils—and he didn’t like what he saw on the screen. “Why did I come?” he wondered aloud, in a manner that suggested depth. “Did I expect this would make me handsome?”
“It’s the way we’ve been socialized,” I said.
“It’s not like I have a deviated septum or anything. It’s not like my insurance is going to pick up the tab.”
Vanitas vanitatum: elective surgery, in other words.
He asked for my professional opinion. I said, “There’s no turning back once we do this, so take some time and think it over. There’s no rush. I don’t like to play God. I’m only an intern doing a rotation here.”
“But you must see a lot of noses in life, on the street, and you must have an artistic opinion,” said Ray.
“If it were I, I wouldn’t,” I said for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with the nauseating sound of bones cracking under mallets in the OR.
“Really? You think the one I have is okay?”
“May I ask why you want to do this now, Mr. Russo?” I asked, glancing at the chart that told me he’d turn forty in a month.
“Let’s be honest: Women like handsome men,” he said, voice wistful, eyes downcast.
What could I say except a polite “And you don’t think you’re handsome enough? Do you think women judge you by the dimensions of your nose?”
Next to me he smiled. The camera mounted above the monitor played it back. He had good teeth.
“I haven’t been very lucky in love,” he added. “I’m forty-five and I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Is your date of birth wrong?” I asked, pointing to the clipboard.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I knock five years off when I’m filling out a job application because of age discrimination, even at forty-five. Bad habit. I forgot you should always tell the truth on medical forms.”
“And what is your field?”
“I’m in business, self-employed.”
I asked what field.
“Concessions. Which puts me before the public. Wouldn’t you think that if everything was okay in the looks department, I’d have met someone by now?”
I hated this part—the psychiatry, the talking. So instead of asserting what is hard to practice and even harder to preach in my chosen field—that beauty’s only skin deep and vastly overrated—I pecked at some keys and moved the mouse. We were back to Ray’s original face, bones jutting, cartilage flaring, nose upstaging, a face that my less scrupulous attending physicians would have loved to pin to their drawing boards. If it sounds as if I saw something there, some goodness, some quality of mercy or masculinity that overrode the physical, I didn’t. I was flattering him to serve my own principles, my own anti – plastic surgery animus. Ray Russo thought my silence meant I wouldn’t change a hair.
“Vows” would reconstruct our consultation, with Ray remembering, “I heard something in her voice. Not that there was a single unprofessional moment between us, but I had an inkling she may have been saying ‘No, don’t fix it’ in order to terminate our doctor-patient relationship and embark on a personal one.”
Reading between the lines, and knowing the outcome, you’d think something was ignited in that consultation, a spark between us, but I wasn’t one of those attractive doctors with a stethoscope draped around her shoulders and a red silk blouse under her lab coat. I was an unhappy intern, plain and no-nonsense at best, and hoping to perform only noble procedures once I’d finished my residency, my fellowship, my board certification—to reconstruct the soft tissue of poor people, to correct their birth defects, their cleft lips and palates, their cranial deformities, their burns, their mastectomies, to stitch up their torn flesh in emergency rooms so that no scar would force them to relive their horrible accidents. I’d hand off to my less idealistic and more affluent associates the nose jobs, the liposuctions, the face-lifts, the eye and tummy tucks, the breast augmentations, and all cosmetic procedures that make the marginally attractive beautiful.
Ray Russo should have consulted someone who would graduate from the program and set up a suite of sleek offices in a big city. I wished him well and sent him home with the four-color brochure that covers the gruesome steps of rhinoplasty.
Why did I take his phone call six months later? Because I didn’t remember him. He dropped the name of my chairman, which made me think he was a friend of that august family—as if he’d sensed I was worried about my standing in the department and my ambivalence toward my then chosen field. Of course, I am summarizing for narrative convenience. Why go into detail about our history, our motivation, our sweet moments, if I’m going to break your heart soon enough? I could add that I have a mother who worries about me, a mother whose motto is “Go for a cup of coffee. It doesn’t mean you have to marry him,” but I’m not blaming her. This is about the weak link in my own character—wishful thinking—and a husband of short duration with a history of bad deeds.
If I sound bitter, I apologize. “Vows” should revisit their brides and grooms a year later, or five or ten. I’d enjoy that on a Sunday morning—scanning the wedding announcements stenciled with updates: NOT SPEAKING. DIVORCED. SEPARATED. ANNULLED. CHEATING ON HIM WITH THE POOL-MAINTENANCE GUY. GAVE BIRTH 5 MONTHS LATER. IN COUNSELING. CAME OUT OF THE CLOSET—any number of interesting developments that reveal the truth about brides and grooms. Ray’s and mine could have multiple stamps, like an expired passport. It could say DIDN’T LAST THE HONEYMOON OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Or, across his conniving forehead, above that hideous nose, succinctly and aptly, LIAR.
2 Later Classified as Our First Date
RAYMOND RUSSO’S SELF-IMPROVEMENT campaign began with a stroke of Las Vegas luck: He won a free teeth-bleaching, upper and lower arches, in a dentist’s lottery. It explained his too-easy grin and his drinking coffee through a straw during what would later be classified as our first date. We were side by side, on stools at the Friendly’s in the lobby of my hospital. Conversation was stalled on my medical degree, which evoked something close to reverence, expressed in boyish, gee-whiz fashion, as if he’d never encountered such a miraculous career trajectory. Was it not flattering? Was I not psychologically pummeled every day? Insulted by evaluations that described my performance as workmanlike and my people skills as hypothermic? Was I not ready for someone, anyone, to utter words of admiration?
“I can’t be the only woman doctor you’ve ever met,” I said. “You must have gone to college with women who went on to medical school.”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t.”
“There are thousands of us,” I said. “Maybe millions. A third of my medical school class were women.”
“Well, keep it coming,” he said. “I know I was happy when you walked into the examining room. It helped me more than some guy saying, ‘Your nose is fine the way it is.’ I might have thought he wanted to keep me homely—you know—to reduce the competition.”
I hoped he was joking, but humor comprehension was never my strong suit. I asked, “Did I take measurements that day, or a history?”
Still smiling, he said, “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”
I said, “It’s coming back to me. Definitely.” Studying his nose in profile, I added, “I’m not a plastic surgeon. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Just the opposite! Thanks to you, I’m going to live with this nose of mine and see how it goes. I know a couple of guys who had nose jobs—I’m not saying they were done upstairs—but I think they look pretty fake.”
I stated for the record—should anyone more senior be listening—“We have some true artists in the department. You could come up and look at the before-and-after photos. They’re quite reassuring.”
He waved away the whole notion. “I could die on the table, and then what? My obituary would say ‘Died suddenly after no illness whatsoever’? ‘In pursuit of a more handsome face’? How would my old man feel? It’s his nose I inherited.”
“General anesthesia always carries a risk,” I said, “and of course there’s always swelling and ecchymoses, but I doubt whether the hospital has ever lost a rhinoplasty patient.”
He smiled again. He tapped the back of my hand and said, “You’re a serious one, aren’t you?”
I confirmed that I was and always would be: a serious infant, a serious child, a serious teenager, a serious student, a serious adult.
“Not the worst quality in a human being,” Ray allowed.
I said, “It would help me in all the arenas of my life if I were a touch more gregarious.”
“Highly overrated,” said Ray Russo. “Any doofus, any deejay or salesman, or waitress, can be gregarious, but they can’t do what you do.”
It sounded almost logical. He asked if a cup of coffee was enough for dinner. Didn’t I want to move to a booth and have a burger? Or to a place where we could share a carafe of wine?
I didn’t.
“My car’s in the hospital garage,” he continued. “I slipped into a reserved space, figuring most does must’ve left for the day.” He took from his pocket a fat wad of bills, secured with a silver clip in the shape of a dollar sign. After much shuffling, he said he had nothing smaller than a fifty.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
The $2.10 tab must have been viewed as a silent acceptance to dinner, because soon he was helping me on with my parka and leading me up a half-flight of stairs and through the door marked GARAGE. Parked under RESERVED FOR DR. HAMID, Ray’s car was red and low-slung. Its steering wheel was wrapped in black leather.
“Seat belt secure?” he asked. “Enough leg room?” He patted the dash and said, “Just got my snow tires on today and my oil changed.”
I said, “I never learned to drive.”
He laughed as if I’d said something amusing, and turned to the parking attendant, who announced, “Three-fifty.”
The attendant studied the fifty, handed it back, agitated it when Ray didn’t take it. “C’mon,” he snapped. “This isn’t Atlantic City.”
Ray said, “Can I pay you tomorrow? She’s a surgeon here. I pick her up every night.”
Snarling, the man waved us through.
When we’d pulled away, I said, “I don’t like lying. I could have paid.”
“He doesn’t care,” said Ray. “He gets paid by the hour regardless of how much is in the till when he cashes out.”
After a few blocks in silence, he asked, “Do you have a roommate?”
“Why?”
He grinned. “I’m making conversation. A guy has to start somewhere. I could’ve asked about brothers and sisters. Teams you follow. Astrological sign.”
“Do you have a roommate?” I asked.
“Me? I’m forty-five. A guy with a roommate at forty-five probably wouldn’t be out on a date in the first place.”
So I’d been right: date. His intentions were personal. I asked what made him call me up after all this time.
“It’s what people do, Doc,” he said. “Guys take a chance, because all of us have pals who met someone on a bus or a bar stool and asked for her phone number. So you think, Have a little courage. What’s the worst she could do?”
“But why now? Why wait until I can’t even remember who you are?”
“There were complications,” he said.
I might have asked what they were, if only I had been curious, interested, or less exhausted.
By this time we were in front of the restaurant. Ray waved away the valet and said he’d take care of it himself—this was a parking lot for the patrons’ use, wasn’t it? Had he misunderstood the sign?
He didn’t like the first table the hostess offered, so we waited until something with the right feeling opened up, the proper footage from the kitchen and the restrooms. It was an Italian fish and chop house with a Tiffany-shaded salad bar and beer served in frosted mugs. Without consulting me, he ordered the appetizer combo plate and a carafe of the house wine. He turned to me. Red or white?
I started to say that the sulfites in red wine gave me—
“Good,” he said. He smiled the way you’d smile for an orthodontist’s Polaroid, clinically, a gum-baring grimace. “Just had a bleach job,” he said. “I’m supposed to avoid red wine, coffee, and tea.”
The waitress pointed to the wine list, under the leather-bound menus, with the end of her pencil.
“I’ll let her pick,” he told the waitress. “She must have good taste. She’s a doctor.”
“What kind?” asked the waitress.
I said the Australian Chardonnay would be fine for me. One glass.
“I meant what kind of doctor.”
“Surgeon,” I said. “Still in training.”
“Not your garden-variety surgeon,” said Ray. “A plastic one.”
The waitress did something then, squeezed her elbows to her waist so that her chest protruded a few degrees more than it had at rest. “I had plastic surgery,” she said, “but I didn’t go crazy. Would you have known if I didn’t tell you?”
I said no.
Ray said, “Isn’t it nice that you can speak about it so openly.”
“She’s a doctor,” said the waitress. “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
“I didn’t know you before, but they look great,” said Ray. “Did you feel that having larger breasts would improve your quality of life?”
“Yeah, I did,” said the waitress.
“And have they?” asked Ray.
“I like ’em,” said the woman. “I guess that’s what counts.”
Ray told the waitress that I had talked him out of a nose job and he’d done a complete one-eighty: He went in wanting one and came out a new man.
“Because she likes it the way it is?” asked the waitress. “Because when she looks at you she doesn’t see the shape of your nose but the content of your character?”
“Nope,” said Ray. “None of the above.”
“I don’t know him at all,” I said.
“It was an office visit,” said Ray. “I came for a consultation. And now I’m buying her dinner because she saved me ten thousand bucks.”
The waitress looked thoughtfully at her pad and said, “I’ll be right back with your drinks and your appetizer.”
I told him, “Everybody has a procedure on their wish list or a scar they want to show me.”
He asked if plastic surgery was more lucrative than the regular kind.
“It can be. Not if you volunteer your time and pay your own expenses to operate on the poor and the disfigured.”
“You do that?”
“I hope to.”
“I’ve seen those doctors who fly planes into jungles. The parents of these deformed kids walk, like, hundreds of miles to bring their Siamese twins to some American doc to separate, right?”
“Hardly that,” I said. “That’s major, major surgery, with teams of—”
“Maybe I’m mixing up my 60 Minutes segments,” he said. “But you know what I mean—the freaks of nature.” Our waitress returned with the wine and said she’d be back with the appetizer combo platter. Ray raised his glass. “Here’s to you, Doc, and to your future good deeds.”
I said, “I don’t understand why you wanted to have coffee with me, let alone a full-course dinner.”
“You don’t? You can’t think of any reason a guy would want to see you outside the hospital?”
I said, “If this is leading up to a compliment, I’d prefer you didn’t. I wouldn’t believe it anyway.”
He reached over and turned a page of the menu so “Pesce” was before me. “Doctors—they watch what they eat and they know about good cholesterol. What about a piece of salmon?”
I said fine, that would be fine.
“And here we go,” said Ray as the waitress made room on the table for our oval platter of deep-fried, lumpen morsels. “I’ll have the usual,” he said, “and the lady will have the salmon.”
“Cooked through,” I said.
Ray winked at me and said, “If she looks at it under the microscope, she doesn’t want to see anything moving.”
“Remind me what your usual is …”
“Vingole,” he said. “Red.”
The waitress asked if she could at some point talk to me in the ladies’ room. It would only take a sec.
“Ask her here,” said Ray.
“Can’t,” said the waitress. “She’s gotta see it.”
I said no, I couldn’t. I was in training. I wasn’t qualified. I’d only rotated through plastic surgery. No, sorry—shaking my head vigorously.
“Are you okay?” Ray asked her. “I mean, is there, like, an infection?”
I was immediately ashamed of my lack of even basic medical curiosity. Here a civilian was saying the right thing, exhibiting a bedside manner that years of schooling had not fine-tuned to any degree of working order in me. So I said, “Is something wrong, or did you just want to show me the results?”
She turned away from Ray and whispered, “One of the nipples. It looks different than before, a little off-kilter.”
“Did you call your doctor?” I asked.
“I’m seeing him in a week. So I’ll wait. It’s probably nothing.”
Ray broke off a piece of bread and dipped it into a saucer of olive oil. “How long could it take, Doc?” he asked.
THE NIPPLE WAS fine—merely stressed by an ill-fitting brassiere—but it gave Ray an early advantage, establishing him as a more compassionate listener than I. He was now drinking a glass of something that looked like a whiskey sour. Mathematically half of the appetizers were awaiting my return. “How is she?” he asked.
“Fine. But I’d like to explain why I resisted. It’s not like the old days. The hospital’s malpractice insurance doesn’t cover diagnoses based on quick glances in the ladies’ room.”
He smiled and said, “She could sign a release that said, ‘My patron at table eleven, Dr. Thrift, is held harmless as a result of dispensing medical advice to me in the ladies’ room of II Sambuco.’”
I said, “If I seemed a little cold-hearted—”
“Nah. You’d be doing this every time you left your house.”
I might have expanded then on my life: That when I left the house, it wasn’t with an escort at my elbow, introducing me left and right as Dr. Thrift, surgeon. I didn’t socialize. I worked long hours and went home comatose. The hospital was teeming with people who wanted to talk, idly or professionally—it didn’t matter. My day was filled with hard questions, half-answers, nervous patients, demanding relatives, didactic doctors. Why would I want to make conversation at night?
“Speaking of your house,” he said, “you never answered my question about roommates.”
“I have one,” I said.
“Another doctor?”
“A nurse, actually.”
“Are you friends?”
“We share the rent,” I said. “But that’s the extent of it. Occasionally we’ll eat dinner or breakfast together, but rarely.”
“How’d you pair up if you’re not friends?”
“An index card on a bulletin board. I think it said, ‘Five-minute walk to hospital. Safe neighborhood. No smokers.’”
“How many bedrooms?”
“Two. Small.”
He launched into a discussion of the rental market—about places I could probably afford that had health clubs, swimming pools, Jacuzzis, off-street parking, central vacs, air-conditioning, refrigerators that manufactured ice …
I tried to stifle a yawn. “I’m usually in bed by this hour.”
“Is she a good roommate?” he asked. “Considerate and all that?”
“It’s a guy,” I said. “Leo.”
“Gay?” he asked.
I said, “Not that I pay attention, or not that he’s flagrant in his dating habits, but when he does entertain guests, they’re women.”
This was what I deserved for agreeing to dine with a garrulous expatient. I asked if this was normal social intercourse for him—drilling virtual strangers about their home life and housemates.
“I’m getting to know you,” he said. “You’re welcome to ask me questions, too.”
So I asked, “Do you live in an apartment?”
“A house.” He bit his lip. “Alone. At least now.”
“Now?” I repeated.
He drained his whiskey sour and blotted his mouth with his big maroon napkin. “I was married,” he said. “And then I was widowed.”
The waitress was back with our entrées just in time to hear his declaration. After leaving the plates, she stayed, as if waiting for the next cold blast from my arsenal of bad manners.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to Ray. “How long ago?”
“A year and a day,” he said.
I said to the waitress, “I think we’re all set for now.”
“More bread when you have a chance,” said Ray.
I asked how his wife had died.
“Not from natural causes.”
“Automobile?”
“Yes,” he said. He raised his wineglass. “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon not go into the details. It’s too upsetting.”
“Of course,” I said.
He scooped a littleneck from its shell and chewed it with something like rapture.