They would meet occasionally for lunch in Chinatown, at a restaurant Larry liked called Emperor's Choice. He reminded Feldman that for six weeks one summer, when they were fourteen, he worked as a busboy at Pekin House, the local Cantonese restaurant. As a busboy, he was allowed to eat anything he wanted there after work, except shrimp dishes, shrimps being too expensive to fritter away on the help. He recalled the owner, a tall Chinese gent who with the passing of years began to dress, talk, and even look Jewish. He did a great imitation of him, using Yiddish words with a Chinese accent: "What you be, some kind messugarner?" Feldman began to laugh, and then thought: this guy, whom he liked so much, banged his wife. 

Why, Feldman wondered, didn't he just clear the deck and ask him, "Larry, did you sleep with Elaine? More than thirty years have gone by, and please believe me I no longer care. Or at least I don't care in any of the standard ways. I'm not jealous. I'm not angry. I'm not, I swear, in any way going to resent it. But I really would like to put a longstanding suspicion to rest." 

Yet Feldman couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't, he supposed, because behind the simple question Did you sleep with Elaine? loomed the accusation of how could you have betrayed me, your closest friend, for a quick roll — or even several slow ones — in the hay? Behind the question Did you sleep with Elaine? lurked the more serious question of What kind of a son of a bitch are you?

A dirty mind never sleeps, somebody or other once said, and now Feldman saw Larry in his current physical state-artificial hip, bypass scars on his chest and leg, pot belly-making love to the then thirty-two-year-old, quite beautiful Elaine Feldman, née Lippman. It was the old porno show, but in historical montage. 

Feldman thought that if Larry and he had been drinkers, they might have got loaded one night, and Feldman could have thrown his arm around Larry and said (add your own best slurring diction here), "Nothing personal, kiddo, but do you remember the first time you schtupped my wife?" But they weren't drinkers, and sober Feldman couldn't even tell his old friend that he was worried about his having put on too much weight, that he was looking scruffy, and not taking decent care of himself. Feldman decided that living in ignorance about this matter was finally not crucial. He told himself that he had forgiven Larry, if he had really slept with his wife. Forgiving, though, was easier than forgetting, or so at least Feldman found.