The Ex

by Lutz, John

  Deirdre was standing in the corridor outside his open office door, watching him.

  16

  Deirdre walked into the office. She looked clean and fresh and was still wearing her tight jeans, but now she had on a gold blouse tucked in around her narrow waist, emphasizing her breasts. Open-toed, high-heeled sandals flashed red enamel that matched her fingernails.

  She smiled; there was something possessive in its white glitter. “I told that girl up front I was coming back here, David.”

  He tried not to show his annoyance, but he didn’t get up from his desk chair. “What do you want?”

  “Oh, I’ve had what I want, David. I only came here to tell you I’m not sorry for what happened. I was weak. We both were. It’s the kind of thing that simply happens, and there shouldn’t be any recriminalizations or guilt.”

  He couldn’t believe he was hearing this. And he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “My God, keep your voice down!”

  Quickly he stood up and closed the door, then sat back down so Deirdre wouldn’t reach for him.

  He hadn’t seen Lisa standing in the hall only a few feet from the door.

  It chilled him to think what it might mean if Deirdre decided to make any kind of scene, what it might do to his life.

  “And why shouldn’t there be any guilt?” he asked.

  “Because love doesn’t take circumstances into account. Love makes us all go round, and we can’t help it.”

  He stared at her; she’d meant what she said. “I do feel guilty, Deirdre. I’m in love with Molly, and I feel responsible.”

  She shook her head as if in mild frustration at not being able to make him see some simple and obvious truth. “But you shouldn’t feel responsible, either. We think we’re in charge of our lives, but that’s a joke on us. We’re really all like pieces in a game, and destiny moves us when and where it wants. It’s not like we don’t have free will, but it’s up to us to make the most of our destiny, whatever situation it puts us in. Don’t you believe in destiny, David?” She seemed somewhat taken aback, as if she’d just discovered he might not believe in the Bill of Rights.

  “To an extent, I suppose. Or maybe it’s just a handy excuse for people to do what they want.” He leaned back in his desk chair, causing it to squeak surprisingly loud in the quiet office. He couldn’t read her eyes. “I take it you believe in destiny?”

  She moved toward him as if drawn. Her voice was fervent. “Oh, yes, David! I sincerely believe certain things were meant to be. I think this afternoon proves it.”

  “I think we’d better forget this afternoon.”

  “But we can’t, and you know it.”

  “What about Molly?”

  “Molly has her own destiny.”

  “It includes me, Deirdre.”

  She shrugged, as if resigned but tolerant. “I can accept that for now.”

  He wanted to leap up, grab her by the shoulders, and shake understanding into her. But he knew he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

  “I’m not talking about for now,” he said. “We’re going to have to avoid seeing each other.”

  She laughed at him as if he were a bright child who would eventually see things her way “Are you afraid of losing control again? I’m not. I’m a Taurus—I know how to accept and control my destiny. That’s something everyone should learn, David. The world would be so much happier.”

  “I don’t like losing control.”

  “Of course you don’t. But the only thing we have to fear is being afraid, David.”

  “It isn’t fear,” he told her. “Or guilt. At least I don’t think so. What we started today can only lead to trouble.” He looked at his hands, gripping the edge of the table where his computer glowed. “No. I guess, to be honest, I am afraid. I’m afraid of loss. I don’t want to lose what I have.”

  She seemed amused. “You won’t lose me. I promise.”

  “You know that isn’t what I meant.”

  She walked over to the bookshelves and examined a stack of manuscripts. Then she moved near the desk and ran her fingertip lightly over the brass frame of the Molly-and-Michael photo. “What you’re really afraid of, David, is destiny. But maybe you’re right. Either way, surely we can remain friends. Molly shouldn’t object to that.”

  “Friends?”

  “That’s all I’m asking for now, David.”

  He didn’t answer her. He knew it was futile.

  She walked to the door, then turned around and smiled at him. “David the Virgo.”

  As she went out, she bumped into Lisa.

  David watched the two women exchange a look he didn’t understand, even though he could almost see the charged arc of emotion. Without a word, they walked away in different directions, as if nothing had happened.

  David wondered if Lisa had overheard any of his and Deirdre’s conversation. It was obvious that Deirdre thought so.

  He looked again at his hands gripping the edge of the computer stand, so hard now that his fingertips were white. It was as if he needed something solid to anchor him in the familiar and manageable world. Strong currents were running and he didn’t understand them. But he knew that an undertow was drawing him inexorably toward where he feared to go.

  He forced himself to relax his grip and watched his fingers gradually loosen, slide slowly, then release their hold on the firm, hard wood.

  David stood that night before the medicine cabinet mirror in the bathroom. He was wearing only Jockey shorts and was holding a white T-shirt. After getting Molly’s hand mirror from the top of the toilet tank, he turned his back to the medicine cabinet.

  It took him only a few seconds to find the angle where he could hold up the hand mirror and see his back in the larger mirror.

  Deirdre hadn’t scratched his back with her fingernails, she’d gouged it. Four parallel tracks of congealed blood on each shoulder blade ran toward each other, not quite meeting at his spine. They were so uniform there was little doubt she’d deliberately marked him as if to claim him. That would be unmistakable to Molly.

  He put down the hand mirror and worked his T-shirt over his head. It was one of his larger ones and draped loosely from his shoulders. Then he picked up the hand mirror and checked again in the medicine cabinet mirror to make sure no fresh blood was seeping through the shirt.

  His eyes met the eyes of his reflection. There was something different about the man staring back at him. He hoped Molly wouldn’t see it.

  He shook his head hopelessly at his image, parting his lips as if to lecture himself. But neither he nor his reflection had any knowledge to impart.

  With a sad smile, he laid the hand mirror back on the toilet tank and left the bathroom.

  In the dim light of the bedroom he settled down on the bed beside Molly. The air conditioner was running and he felt cool air pass like liquid over his bare legs.

  The sheets rustled as Molly moved close to him. She kissed him on the mouth, and in the tautness of her lips he felt rather than saw her smile.

  David kissed her back, then yawned and maneuvered her around so that she was facing away from him and they were lying on their sides molded together spoon-fashion. He reached back and adjusted his T-shirt, then lay with his arm thrown over her and patted her wrist.

  “Kinda tired tonight, hon,” he murmured. “Only cuddle, okay?”

  He felt her body tense. “Sure,” she said into the darkness, “we’ve got the rest of our lives.”

  He knew she was lying there awake, staring at the shadowed wall, and hoped she couldn’t feel the vibration of his quickened heartbeat.

  In the morning, he wondered which of them had fallen asleep first.

  17

  Deirdre had eaten supper at a deli near the movie theater. Now she sat alone in the dark, watching Esther Williams do underwater calisthenics. At least that’s what they looked like to Deirdre. She thought she could do what Williams was doing, and look better doing it. She might even be a better swimmer.

  Well, no, she ha
d to admit. Maybe not a better swimmer. But Williams was a strong-looking woman like Deirdre, an athlete with curves. And probably, if you took swimming out of the mix, not as good an athlete as Deirdre. Maybe even if you left swimming in. Deirdre was sure she could have beaten a young Esther Williams at the decathlon. Or in a martial arts tournament. She smiled at the idea.

  Deirdre loved to sit alone at the movies, secure in the darkness, lost in the world on the screen. She had always been fond of dark, safe places: movie theaters, closets, basements. But at the movies was the best place of all to be, with not only security, but a world that was as real as her own, brilliant and actual before her, claiming her eyes and her mind.

  Everything in Williams’s world was so perfect, so beautiful. Problems and people moved in and out of her celluloid life, but always things worked out for her no matter how menacing her antagonists or how gloomy the outlook. The screenplay took care of her like benign fate.

  The music swelled. The screen was now filled with dozens of beautiful women in one-piece bathing suits diving through flaming hoops into the spacious pool. The camera followed some of them underwater, where they smiled as they kept their form, legs tight together and toes pointed, and rose toward the surface like graceful mermaids.

  Deirdre preferred old movies. They drew you into their world and held you there. The new movies came out of the screen at you, tried to startle you with abrupt, jarring images like on MTV and with sudden loud noises. Sometimes they posed questions without answering them, and she would leave the theater perplexed rather than reassured. But tonight, she knew as she watched the aquatics and troubled love affairs, that by the end of the last reel everything would be resolved. As it might at least possibly be in her own life. If it happened to Esther Williams, why not to Deirdre?

  She sat transfixed by the movie until the final credits had run and the house lights came on to reveal the dinginess of the theater and the flawed humanity of the patrons rising from their seats or filing up the aisles toward the lobby and exits. A very thin man who looked unhealthy, with a yellow-white beard, glanced over at Deirdre as he passed in the aisle. He grinned toothlessly and winked. She gave him an angry look and he walked on. He was nothing like any of the men who had courted Williams.

  When almost everyone had filed from the auditorium, she rose from her seat and walked up the aisle.

  The lobby was like an air lock between the predictable and perfect parallel world of the screen, and the tawdry and sometimes surprising world outside the glass doors. Deirdre stood and watched people stream past outside. Some of them were well dressed, obviously tourists or Broadway theatergoers. Others were shabby and had a furtive air about them and walked hurriedly, as if something might be pursuing them. Three teenage boys jumped and bounced past, yelling at each other and grinning. An old woman laden with shopping bags waved a cab over and climbed into the back, glaring after the boys as if they’d been the final straw that had made her hail a taxi rather than walk the rowdy, unsafe streets. A slim woman with graceful, slender legs, wearing high heels and a light blue raincoat, strode past.

  Darlene!

  Deirdre ran to the nearest glass door, opened it, and stepped out to the middle of the sidewalk. Someone bumped into her and didn’t apologize, but she hardly noticed. She was staring at the woman in the blue raincoat, who was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street.

  “Darlene!” she called. But apparently the woman didn’t hear her.

  Deirdre began walking toward her, preparing to call Darlene’s name again when she was closer.

  Then the woman turned around and hurried to the other side of the cross street to take advantage of the still unchanged traffic signal. Deirdre saw her face for a few seconds and realized with disappointment that she wasn’t Darlene. Her eyes had been fooled by some other woman who from a distance, and at a glance from a certain angle, resembled a youthful Audrey Hepburn. Only this woman wasn’t so young. Maybe even in her mid-fifties.

  Suddenly Deirdre was acutely, piercingly lonely. She knew now that she’d felt that way since the end of the movie. That had to be why she’d so wanted the woman to be Darlene.

  She decided to go for a walk, to be among the crowds of people in Times Square. She’d heard that lonely people could be even lonelier in a crowd, but she knew that it wasn’t always true. So much of conventional wisdom was wrong. Tonight, she’d feel better surrounded by fellow human beings.

  Before setting out, she decided to call her hotel and see if there were any messages. If everything had gone smoothly, like in the movies, the real estate agency would have called to give her the final go-ahead. The agent had said that there should be no problem because the apartment was vacant and had been for almost a month. But you never knew.

  Back in the lobby, she asked an usher for directions to a public phone, and he told her there was one near the rest rooms but for movie patrons only. He remembered her, though, and gave her permission to use the phone. Kindness from a stranger. A hopeful sign.

  The hotel switchboard operator had her hold the line for a minute, then returned and said yes, there was a message for her.

  Deirdre smiled as she listened to the message read over the phone.

  She hung up and smiled at the usher as she was leaving the lobby for the second time. Developments had shaped this world so that for now it was like the world of the movie screen. The dynamics were the same, as Deirdre’s present and near-future were concisely and benignly scripted by fate. The times when such convergences occurred were rare, and she appreciated and savored them.

  The apartment was hers. Of course there was the problem of money, but Deirdre was sure that one could be resolved. It was in the stars for her, just as it would have been in the world on screen.

  On the teeming pavement, she walked fast. People got out of her way.

  18

  Molly wheeled Michael in his stroller from the elevator the next morning and stopped near the bank of tarnished brass mailboxes. The apartment building’s lobby was almost small enough to be called a foyer. Gray tiles flecked with black ran halfway up the walls, which were painted an industrial green. There was no doorman, and the intercom had been painted over so many times that it was obviously inoperable. The finely cracked gray marble floor was littered with crushed cigarette butts, a crumpled McDonald’s wrapper, and marred with dark scuff marks from heels. Molly noted with some alarm what looked like a crack vial whose glass had been ground under someone’s shoe to a fine, reflective powder that glittered like diamond dust.

  She fished her key ring from her purse and unlocked her mailbox. Above the bank of mailboxes with their sometimes functional doorbell buttons, someone had painstakingly but obviously altered black felt-tip graffiti reading “fuck you” to the less objectionable “book you.”

  Nothing in the mail much interested Molly. There was a statement from Apple Bank, an appeal for a donation to a charity she’d never heard of, a pamphlet without a postmark that warned of an imminent global reckoning with God, and a mail-order catalog of remaindered books.

  She slipped the mail into her purse. The elevator doors opened, and an elderly man she remembered from standing in the street with the other tenants during false fire alarms emerged. He smiled and nodded a good morning to her, then held the street door open while she pushed the stroller outside into bright sunlight.

  It was going to be another hot day, but the morning was still comfortable. As she pushed the stroller along West Eighty-fifth on the way to Small Business, she found herself looking around tentatively, half expecting to see the woman with the mirror-lens glasses.

  But if the woman was nearby, she was staying out of sight.

  Nor did Molly see the woman in the park later that morning as she jogged her usual course along the sun-dappled trail, listening to her own deep breathing and the rhythmic light touch of her rubber soles on the warm asphalt. She was running well, with spring in her step. This was why she jogged, this feeling that through determined and
relentless exertion she could overcome all obstacles and keep her world in balance and control.

  But she experienced a surprising surge of anxiety as she approached the place on the trail where she’d seen the woman yesterday.

  When she passed that point and had jogged several hundred yards farther, she relaxed.

  If she didn’t want the woman—Deirdre, she still suspected—to upset the morning even in her absence, she decided she’d better concentrate on finishing her run.

  She slowed her pace and regulated her breathing, settling into the mental and physical groove she knew would allow her to go the distance. She felt secure enough now. There were other joggers on the trail, people walking, even a pair of lovers in each other’s arms on a blanket. She could hear the hum of traffic, and through the trees glimpse the fleeting bright yellow of a cab passing on one of the park’s gently curving streets.

  Deirdre and Craig Chumley were in the back of the cab. Chumley was clenching his jaws as Deirdre, leaning down and to the side, performed oral sex on him.

  He groaned and the driver glanced again in the rearview mirror. Chumley, and Deirdre, knew the driver was aware of what was happening in the back of his cab. Neither minded; he was simply part of the fantasy.

  Deirdre raised her head. Her eyes met the driver’s boldly in the mirror and he looked away. She saw the curve of his cheek as he smiled and concentrated as best he could on his driving. He was probably never surprised by what went on between his passengers.

  She wiped her wrist across her mouth and leaned back in the upholstery, letting her head drop to the side to rest against Chumley’s shoulder. The lush green trees, the on-coming traffic, the people in the park, slid past outside the window like a bright dream.

  Chumley made no move to zip his fly.

  “God!” he said softly, “you didn’t have to stop!”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I…well, I’ve got a lot of worries lately.”