The Ex

by Lutz, John

  Deirdre took a step toward him. “I guess you’re surprised to see me, David, but I wanted to kind of clear the atmosphere. I got the impression at the restaurant that Molly was a little aggravated by the situation.”

  From the corner of his eye David saw Lisa look up from her paperwork.

  “No, no,” he said to Deirdre, “she’d just had a hard day and was a little touchy.”

  Deirdre’s smile wavered slightly as if she were nervous. “I need your help, David. A favor.”

  “Well…”

  “A woman I met, Darlene, told me about a furnished apartment near here that’s for rent. I have a key and I’m supposed to go by and look at it. The rental agent should meet me there, but this is the big city, and I guess I’m a little scared to go alone. Anyway, I don’t even know what to look for in a New York apartment.”

  “The agent gave you a key?”

  “Well, I sort of talked him into it…”

  David swallowed as he realized where the conversation was headed. “Listen, Deirdre, I’m not sure—”

  She’d moved closer to him; she extended her arm and brushed his chest with the tip of her middle finger, somehow making the gesture extremely intimate. “It is lunchtime, David, and when I realized I was near your office, I thought, My God, I do have a male friend in the big city! I was sure you’d take ten minutes to walk around the corner with me and look at this place. I’d feel a lot better if a man—if you—okayed the apartment before I made any kind of commitment.”

  David saw that Lisa was staring at Deirdre curiously now, her paperwork forgotten. Deirdre swiveled her head a few inches and stared back. Immediately Lisa turned her attention to the papers on the desk.

  “I don’t know…” David said. He wanted to go with Deirdre, but something in the core of him told him to refuse.

  “Ten little minutes out of your life is all I’m asking, David.” Deirdre smiled again, this time with subtle challenge. “Are you afraid Molly wouldn’t approve?”

  “It isn’t that,” he said. He glanced over at Lisa, who was studiously not paying attention.

  “Now, David…”

  “All right,” he heard himself say “Give me a minute while I save what’s on my computer.”

  “Sure,” Deirdre said. “Better safe than worry. And thank you, David! You don’t know how reassuring this is.”

  She watched him as he disappeared through the oak doors behind the receptionist’s desk.

  Now Lisa did look up from her paperwork. “There’s a copy of Home Companion on the coffee table for you to read while you’re waiting,” she said. “It might give you some decorating ideas.”

  “Thanks,” Deirdre said. “I see it right next to a copy of Mind Your Own Business.”

  Only seconds after Deirdre and David had left the office, Josh wandered in and stood at the desk near Lisa.

  He gave her his amiable grin that always made her think he should be the host of a TV game show. “Looking out for your boss, Lisa?”

  Obviously embarrassed, she glared at him. “I’ve got a feeling he needs looking out for. Did you see that woman?”

  “Did I ever.”

  “She wants him to help her look for an apartment.”

  No kidding? I think she might be his ex-wife.” He placed his palms on the desk and leaned close to her, still grinning. “You jealous?”

  She pretended to stab at him with a pencil and he faded back neatly to avoid the sharp point. “Find something to do, Josh.”

  “An apartment…” she heard him say as he walked back toward his office. “A pied-à-terre.”

  “Be quiet, Josh.”

  “A love nest…”

  14

  It was a corner apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a stone and glass building on Second Avenue. The hall was white and carpeted in beige. At the end of the hall was a tall, narrow window, but most of the illumination was provided by brass sconces set high on the walls to reflect light off the white ceiling. The apartment doors looked like darkly grained wood but David suspected they were steel.

  Deirdre handed him the key. The small cardboard tag attached to it by a string read 34F. After making sure they were at the right door, he fit the key into the deadbolt lock above the doorknob, turned it, then pushed the door open. Stale air wafted toward the hall, as if the apartment had been unoccupied for a while.

  “You’d better go first, David,” Deirdre said behind him.

  He stepped into the apartment. The living room was bright, small, and uncluttered, with abstract prints on the walls, a low-slung modern sofa and angular slate-topped tables. A black, lacquered wall unit held a large-screen TV, a stereo, and some crystal animal figures. Half a dozen books that appeared never to have been read were propped between large onyx bookends in the shape of charging bulls that seemed to be squeezing the books together.

  A loud metallic click made him turn.

  Deirdre had locked the door behind them.

  David looked back to the apartment’s interior. “Hello!”

  No answer.

  “I don’t guess the rental agent’s here yet,” Deirdre said. She began to walk around slowly and hesitantly, like a wary trespasser, touching objects randomly and gently as if to reassure herself that they really did exist. “Look at all the light streaming through that window!” She exclaimed. “It’s beautiful! I love this room!”

  “It’s well furnished if you like modern,” David said. He didn’t like modern and thought the apartment looked like a futuristic art gallery.

  “Darlene said the man who lives here sells and demonstrates electronics. He needs to sublease because he travels all over the world and he’s going to make his home base in London for a while. He’s smart like you are, David.”

  “If I were smart, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” she said.

  He trailed behind her as she walked to a short hall and glanced into the kitchen gleaming with white cabinets and appliances. She gave the black and white tiled bathroom the same cursory examination. The open door at the end of the hall led to the bedroom. She entered and he paused in the doorway, then followed.

  The bedroom contianed only a king-sized bed, a dresser, a chair, and a small triangular table with a lamp and heavy glass ashtray on it. Beyond the foot of the bed was a wide window whose light was barely muted by gauzy white ceiling-to-floor curtains.

  “You did say a rental agent was supposed to meet you here, didn’t you?” David asked.

  “That’s what I thought someone said to me, but they might have been mistaken.”

  He knew that the odds on a rental agent showing up were slim.

  Deirdre walked to the wide window and located the pull cord. Rollers rasped in their traverse-rod track as she parted the curtains.

  “Just look at this view, David!”

  He dutifully walked across the bedroom’s plush rose carpet and stood at the window.

  The view was toward the river and Queens. Afternoon sun highlighted the tall buildings so they were deceptively beautiful. The ornate steel suspension of the Queensboro Bridge was visible. Far below in the shadowed and sun-hazed canyons, tiny cars and foreshortened pedestrians crawled along in symmetrical puzzle-patterns of activity.

  He heard, then felt, Deirdre move close behind him.

  “What do you see, David?” Her voice was soft.

  “New York. Too many people hurrying and not knowing where they’re going.”

  He felt her fingertips on his shoulder and he turned.

  “Now what do you see?”

  She was standing even closer than he’d thought and had unbuttoned her blouse almost all the way down. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her large, firm breasts parted the fabric. One erect nipple was visible.

  David opened his mouth, about to say her name, then her lips were closed over his, warm and writhing, soft and insistent. He felt the velvet wedge of her tongue.

  With an effort of will and physical strength, he broke
away from the kiss.

  “Not a good idea, Deirdre.” He was breathing hard.

  Desire glowed like fever in her eyes. “It was once. It can be again. Besides, you want to.”

  “That doesn’t make it a good idea.”

  He started to walk away from her but she blocked him with the length of her body smiling up at him. She kissed him again. He resisted again, but not as determinedly.

  “Listen, Deirdre…” He hated the wavering note in his voice.

  He felt her hand work between their bodies, find its way inside the front of his pants. She began to manipulate him, gently, so that it seemed such a natural thing to do. They had been intimate in a way never forgotten.

  “At least once, anyway,” she breathed. “Don’t make me beg, David.”

  Under the warm pressure of her fingers he felt himself go from tumescent to rigid. He threw back his head and stared straight up at the ceiling. His body cried to do what his mind was rejecting. “Jesus!”

  “That sounds like a prayer, David. It can be answered.” Her hand continued its clever, expert work. She knew him; their bodies knew one another. Forever familiar. “We both want the same thing, the very same thing…”

  The tightness in his body grew taut, and something in him gave.

  He lifted her and carried her to the bed. Laid her down and bent over her, kissing her breasts as she pulled at his shirt. He raised his head then, and they virtually tore each other’s clothes off.

  Pale and nude, beautiful as memory, she lay before him, gazing up at him with amusement and lust. “Want to hurt me, David? Want to whip me with your belt?”

  He felt the mood shift.

  “I’m not into that anymore, Deirdre.”

  She gave him the most lascivious grin he’d ever seen. “Honestly?”

  “Yeah, honestly. Straight sex is gonna have to be good enough.” He bent lower, kissed her.

  When their lips parted, she gripped his earlobe and twisted it playfully. “Want me to hurt you? You been a bad boy?” She gave his ear an extra twist.

  He gripped her hand and lowered it. “Straight sex, Deirdre.”

  She pulled him down to her, on her. He kissed her lips again, her breasts, her stomach, the dark, wet center of her. She spread her legs wide, guided him up to kiss him again, then wrapped her legs around his waist as he entered her.

  She made a deep, throaty sound and he began thrusting, slowly at first, spanning warm interior spaces, then faster and more violently as his passion took him. Her long, powerful legs clamped tightly around his waist like a trap. “Hurt me!” she moaned in his ear. “Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me, David! Please!”

  He gripped her wrists and bent her arms back behind her head, watching her grimace and narrow her eyes. Her lips tightened, baring her teeth. He felt the core of her throbbing, then her fingernails clawing, digging painfully into his back. Her body arched with a power that surprised him. He knew she was climaxing as she whispered hoarsely in his ear. “Mine, mine, mine, MINE!”

  She went limp beneath him and her legs fell to the sides as he thrust into her violently and emptied himself.

  She kissed his ear, the one she’d twisted, as he slowly disengaged himself from her and rolled gasping onto his back.

  Neither of them spoke.

  He tried to analyze what he felt but couldn’t; his mind was still floating somewhere above body and desire, connected by only tenuous neural threads.

  Finally, after he’d caught his breath, he stood up and went to the window, where he stood staring again at the teeming riddle of Manhattan. The scratches on his back felt like wounds from a lioness.

  From behind him on the bed, he heard Deirdre say, “That was lovely, David. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  Twenty minutes later, as they were leaving the apartment, David knew how he felt: guilty and ashamed. Deirdre, he noticed with dread, looked smug. He couldn’t deny that he’d wanted her desperately, uncontrollably. Couldn’t deny it to her or to himself.

  He held the door open for her and she edged past him into the hall, brushing him with her hip, glancing briefly up at him with a sated kind of lust that slumbered.

  Behind them, and behind the louvered doors of the bedroom closet, a videocassette ran out of tape.

  There was a soft click, a whir, and in the dark closet a pinpoint of red light winked out.

  15

  Molly emerged from Small Business among a swarm of parents and children. She carried Michael with one arm and used her free hand to guide the stroller down the stone steps to the sun-washed sidewalk.

  When Michael was strapped into the stroller’s canvas seat, he and Molly both waved to Julie, who was standing in the shade of the canopy watching her charges depart with their regular guardians. The responsibility she’d carried all morning was now divided and dispersed; Molly wondered if Julia felt as suddenly free as she appeared.

  As Molly pushed the stroller along crowded West Eighty-fifth, she found herself glancing uneasily from time to time across the street. Through the intermittent and glaring stream of noisy traffic, she half expected to see the woman in the blue baseball cap and mirror-lens glasses.

  But there was no sign of the woman.

  When they reached the apartment building, Molly entered the lobby then wheeled the stroller directly to the elevator. She pushed the button for the floor above hers, where Bernice Clark lived.

  Bernice was a thin, thirty-five-year-old woman with a huge mass of tightly sprung brown hair that made her seem even frailer than she was. She’d been out of work except for occasional jobs arranged by Modern Office Temps since Molly had met her. Bad luck had left her harried but cheerful. Irrepressible optimism ran in her blood; a firing squad would have to fire into her smile to erase it. Molly felt comfortable leaving Michael with her.

  Bernice looked paler than usual this afternoon as she let them into the apartment. She unstrapped then scooped up Michael from the stroller and kissed him on the cheek. He grinned, and when she placed him on the hardwood floor, he swaggered directly to the TV, where Martin and Lewis’s Jumping Jacks was playing without sound. Jerry Lewis was mugging and twitching around while Dean Martin stood calmly and stared at him with that odd combination of amusement and disdain. Michael plopped down in front of the screen and became engrossed.

  The apartment’s floor plan was identical to Molly and David’s, but it was furnished more sparsely and cheaply. Near the old console TV was a cushionless chair that seemed ready to collapse. Its cushion was lying on the floor near the window, as if Bernice had been sitting on it staring outside. The place smelled slightly and pleasantly of pine-scented cleanser and wax. There was no sign of dust along the baseboards or on the scarred hardwood floor. Bookshelves fashioned from planks laid across stacks of bricks contained only knickknacks and dog-eared paperbacks, along with a few bound uncorrected proofs that Molly had given Bernice. An ornately framed round mirror hung on another wall, centered over a polished mahogany half-moon table, leftovers from more prosperous times.

  “I appreciate you watching Michael,” Molly told Bernice. “It wasn’t in my plans to work almost every afternoon, but suddenly the publisher needs the manuscript I’m editing by next week.”

  Bernice ran her fingers through her mass of hair. “Hey, no problem. We live in the same building, and I’m getting paid, aren’t I?”

  Molly grinned. “And worth every inflated dollar.” She looked more closely at Bernice’s pasty complexion and the tiredness in her eyes. “You look pale today. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Sure. I just need some sun.” She glanced over at Michael. “Maybe I’ll take our guy swimming at Koch Pool, if it’s okay with you.”

  “Sure, just keep a close eye on him. And make sure he doesn’t get too much sun.” Molly looked at Michael, still lost in Jumping Jacks. Lewis had parachuted from an airplane and was drifting toward the ground, clutching his chute’s lines, squirming around and looking terrified. “What about a real job?” she asked Bernice
. “Having any luck with those résumés you sent out?”

  “Not much. But there’s always hope. And thanks for printing them on your computer for me. They make me seem so employable that even I might want to hire me.”

  A siren sounded close outside, then a fire engine’s loud, rude air horn blasted twice to help clear a path through traffic. The wail of the siren moved away, fading until it was absorbed in the usual muted turmoil of the city.

  “That reminds me,” Bernice said, “there was another false fire alarm while you were gone the other day. Third one in the last few months, if I’m counting right. It’s getting so half the tenants don’t pay much attention or bother to leave the building.”

  Molly could understand why. She and Michael had heeded the alarm once. Another time it had sounded in the middle of the night, and she and David had hurriedly gathered up Michael and obediently trudged downstairs to stand in the street until it was determined that there was no fire. Her fear was that if a fire did break out, too many tenants would ignore the erratic alarm that so far had meant nothing but inconvenience.

  “The management company ought to repair the wiring,” she said.

  Bernice grinned and shook her head. “They’d rather stall. They figure if there really is a fire someday, they can redecorate the apartments of all the dead tenants and charge more rent. Hey, there’s Muffin!” She pointed toward a spot near Molly’s feet.

  Molly wasn’t surprised. She stooped and picked up the cat, who purred and snuggled warmly against her side. “He leaves by way of the window we keep propped open a few inches for him, then gets back into the building when people enter and roams the corridors. I hope nobody thinks he’s a pest.”

  Bernice reached out and stroked Muffin. “In this city there could be lots worse things than cats roaming the corridors.”

  At Sterling Morganson, David looked away from his computer monitor and drew in his breath in surprise.