Читать книгу Eligible - Curtis Sittenfeld - Страница 23

Close to midnight, as Liz was shutting down her computer, she heard someone ascending the staircase to the third floor; to her surprise, it was Mary rather than Jane. On Mary’s face was an unconcealed smirk. “Look.” She passed her phone to Liz.

The small screen showed an item on a celebrity gossip website that Liz thought of as holding greater appeal for Kitty and Lydia than Mary, with a headline that read, “Flunky Hunky: Did Eligible Bachelor Almost Fail Out of Harvard Medical School?” Below was a photo of Chip Bingley in a tuxedo, clinking champagne flutes with one of the comely female finalists from his season. Liz skimmed the entry, which was only a paragraph (“Former classmates say Bingley was known more for hitting the bike trails than the books …”), then gave back the phone. “So?” she said. “He passed his boards, obviously.”

“If you cut off your finger, would you want him to be the one to stitch it on?”

“The fact that he wasn’t first in his class doesn’t mean he’s incompetent.”

Mary raised her eyebrows dubiously. “I knew there was something fishy about a graduate of Harvard Medical School ending up in an ER in Cincinnati. It was probably the only job he could get.”

This seemed a rather presumptuous judgment from someone who herself had never been employed. “Don’t show that to anyone,” Liz said. “Even if it’s true, it’s irrelevant.”