Other Women by Lisa Alther Page A

touching fellow, with his receding hairline, his mournful eyes, and his endless grief over Irene’s departure. Although she scarcely knew him, she’d become his confidante. It was impossible not to because Irene was all he ever talked about.
    “Mind if I join you?”
    Brian looked up with bloodshot eyes and a pained smile. “Delighted.”
    Taking the dishes off her tray, Caroline asked, “So how’s it going?” “Fine. Just fine.”
    Caroline sat down and picked up her fork.
    “Pretty day?” “Not bad for December.”
    “What’s new?”
    Brian sighed. “Nothing much. Same old grind.”
    “As the burlesque queen said to the bishop.”
     
    OTHER
    “What?”
    “It’s an old joke.”
    “Sorry. I guess I’m pretty out of it today.”
    “Please don’t tell your patients,” said Caroline.
    “They’re out cold. They don’t know the difference.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Oh, I talked to Irene this morning.”
    “How’s she?”
    “All right, I guess. But I really don’t understand women.” Brian was handling his knife and fork as adroitly as he did a scalpel, with long graceful fingers.
    “Don’t look at me,” said Caroline, her mouth full of lettuce. “That makes two of us.”
    “I mean, for example,” he said, gesturing with his fork, “Irene loved to buy all this stuff clothes, furniture, cars, trips. And I had to bust ass to pay for it. But then she complained I was never home.
    I don’t get it.” He shook his head.
    Caroline thought she got it, but she wasn’t sure it would be kind to explain that maybe all those purchases were an attempt to fill the gap where a husband should have been. “Sounds like my marriage.”
    “I didn’t realize you’d been married.”
    “Many years ago.”
    He laughed. “Come on, you can’t be that old.”
    “Some days I feel older than King Tut.”
    He sighed. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
    Do you, wondered Caroline. If only they had more time, it might be interesting to find out. Besides, she’d just seen Diana glance in their direction.
    “I always wondered why an attractive woman like you wasn’t married.” Brian studied her with his sad eyes, resting his chin on his fist.
    Oh, give me a break, thought Caroline. She stood up. “Gotta run, Brian. Nice
    talking with you.”
    Caroline sat down behind the ER admissions desk and picked up a pencil from atop a stack of patients’ charts, intending to make the list for Hannah and hoping no one would come rolling through those swinging doors on a stretcher. She used to feel such delight at the People’s Free Clinic when a woman hemorrhaging from a coat hanger
    WOMEN
     
    abortion or a student on a bad trip staggered into the cluttered storefront office in Somerville. She was needed. She could help. Now she wished they’d leave her out of it. She’d lost her nerve. She was terrified she’d freeze with horror at some crucial moment, as she had that afternoon over the little boy with the gaping head wound. Who was she to think she could help anybody? It was all she could do to keep herself
    alive.
    She wrote the word “kind,” just to prime the pump.
    But what about the hats of street musicians she hadn’t tossed coins into, the hitchhikers she’d driven past, the Muscular Dystrophy cannisters she hadn’t deposited change in, the phone market surveys she hung up on, the times she pretended not to be home when Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked? She crossed out “kind.”
    Brian was being paged over the PA: “Dr. Stone, Dr. Stone, fourth floor, fourth floor …”
    Caroline wrote “honest.” But was it honest to pretend that she and Diana were just roommates simply in order not to lose their jobs and cause their children harassment on the playground? Was it honest to sit behind this desk and dread the arrival of patients? She drew a line through “honest” and scribbled “unkind” and “dishonest.” She studied those words. That was the effect of her behavior, but it wasn’t the