it go until he has pulled back her chair and motioned for her to sit down. She is so nervous that she has trouble looking at him, but his eyes seem to be steadily on her. “I have to think that you’re a woman of the world, Anna,” he says while they eat vegetable samosas and drink tepid tea.
She smiles, startled. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, in part because of who your father is.”
“You know who he is?”
“Of course. I think most people do.”
She looks down at the table, trying not to let him see her discomfort. She does not want to talk about her father. She does not want him to be present for any part of what she is probably going to do with Dr. Glass—Tom—which he has asked her to call him outside of the hospital. “My mother’s really the one who raised my brother, Billy, and me,” she says. “My father was gone a lot while we were growing up, and he and my mother got divorced when I was eleven.”
“But you still must have seen him when he was in town.”
“Yes, I did.” It isn’t strictly true that her mother did most of the parenting. She and Billy were with their father relatively often because they sometimes went where he was working during their school holidays, and when he was in L.A., they stayed with him on the weekends, Melinda, his second wife, babysitting them until they were old enough to take care of themselves, which was about the same time that he divorced her.
“Why didn’t you want to go into acting too?”
“I guess I didn’t have the guts.”
“You need more guts to be a doctor, I think.”
She laughs softly. “Yes, that’s probably true.”
“It is, Anna. Don’t doubt it.”
“My mother’s a doctor.”
He nods. “I remember you saying that during your first week with me.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean my first week last year or my first week this year?”
“Last year.”
She looks at him, as pleased by this admission as anything he has previously said to her.
He hesitates. “One thing I feel I should say is that I don’t make a habit of asking my interns out.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
He regards her. “Have you ever dated one of your professors or attendings before?”
“No.”
“They were too shy to ask you, I’m sure.”
“I doubt it. But that’s fine, because I wasn’t interested in any of them.” She glances at his hand and sees that he is wearing his wedding ring. She wonders if he ever takes it off or if he has left it there to remind her that he belongs to someone else.
“But you are interested in me?” he murmurs.
She feels a nervous laugh bubbling in her throat. “Yes, but I know that I shouldn’t be.”
“Why not? Because I’m married?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Because we work together?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t name any names, but attending physicians go out with interns all the time. As long as everyone’s discreet, it’s not a problem. Some of my colleagues have married their former interns.” He pauses. “You don’t have to worry about my wife. She and I give each other a lot of breathing room.”
It seems likely that two or more of these statements are a lie, but Anna doesn’t challenge him. Her heart is beating so hard that she can feel it pulsing in her throat. She barely tastes the food they have ordered, and the sounds of other diners’ conversations filter into her ears but hardly register. She will never be able to tell her mother about Dr. Glass. It would be smart not to tell anyone about him, but she has already told Jill, and the day after their conversation, Celestine. One of the pleasures of behaving badly, she is beginning to realize, is how good it feels to have dirty secrets, and how hard it is to keep them to herself.
After their waiter brings the check, Dr. Glass looks at her (Tom, Anna reminds herself) and says, “If you don’t want to go back to your place today, we don’t have to. But if you do want to, I think that’d be nice.”
Is this how it’s done? she wonders, surprised by how naive she feels, knowing what she does about the rarefied plane her father inhabits, about the things that the people he works with sometimes do, how some of them have lovers in cities all over the world, how some have been treated for sex addiction, which has always seemed to her a surreal ailment to be “cured”