The Ex

by John Lutz

  Yet she was afraid.

  Not of the old woman, she realized suddenly, but of something she couldn’t quite identify.

  A man walking a pair of black poodles on short leashes came into sight from among the trees near the lake. He was moving directly toward Molly and the old woman.

  The woman gathered up her bulging plastic bag and, with a final scathing glance at Molly, began shuffling away in the opposite direction. She and the man walking the poodles passed within ten feet of each other without seeming to notice, on the same planet but not in the same universe.

  When the man passed Molly, he looked over at her and smiled, then strolled on. She heard him speak sharply to one of the poodles that was interested in something in the bushes and had strained the leash pulling to the side. With a firm tug on the thin leather leash, he drew the desperately curious dog back near him and continued walking.

  Molly, seemingly alone now in the sun-dappled park, was still uneasy, and still unsure why. It was as if an unremembered nightmare were plaguing her with a residue of terror. She felt isolated and vulnerable. She hurried toward the brighter sunlight and the sounds of traffic drifting from beyond the trees near Central Park South, breaking into a jog as the shadow of a cloud closed in on the trail and trees around her, darkening grass and leaves.

  It occurred to her then that since beginning her morning run she’d had the vague, unaccountable sensation that something was behind her, stalking her.

  She remembered the woman who’d been badly beaten while jogging in the park, the victim of a wilding, as it was called. A stockbroker or financial consultant or some such thing. Running along as Molly had been, thinking of stocks or her love life or treasury bills, maybe a friend she was meeting tomorrow for lunch-then all of that had almost ended permanently for her at the hands of cruel strangers.

  Fear passed like cool air over the backs of Molly’s forearms and the nape of her neck, causing her to hunch her shoulders.

  Ridiculous, she told herself. As ridiculous as being afraid of a poor, harmless old woman innocently taking in the sun, perhaps the only friend left for her.

  What must it be like, Molly wondered, nearing the end of life and without a human friend?

  Without love.

  Then her sense of isolation ended abruptly, along with her fear. She was out of the park and on the sidewalk, surrounded by more people than she could count, within twenty feet of hundreds of vehicles streaming past, even a horse-drawn carriage heading into the park.

  In the middle of New York again.

  The middle of her life.

  At the edge of the park, Deirdre stood watching.

  4

  It was hot in Manhattan, but still a glorious day. David Jones pushed open the doors of the Hand Building on Third Avenue and stepped out onto the crowded sidewalk. Horns blared as the traffic signal at Third and East Fifty-fourth flashed green, and nothing larger than a deliveryman on inline skates was able to budge because of the gridlocked intersection. David began to walk, glad not to be in one of the yellow taxis baking immobile in the sunlight, caught in a web of progress gone mutant and mad.

  He was an average-sized man, fit but not yet muscular despite his regular workouts at Silver’s Gym on East Fifty-sixth. With his lean features, unruly sandy hair, and round-lensed glasses with their fragile brown frames, he looked much more the intellectual than the athlete.

  Thirty-seven his last birthday, and still the supervisor of the fee reading department at Sterling Morganson Literary Agency, he was beginning to wake up nights worrying about not progressing in life. Not to where he wanted to be, anyway. His job paid reasonably well; it was simply that David had been working at it longer than he’d planned. He’d expected that by this time he’d be an authors’ representative at the agency and positioned for an eventual executive position on the board. Morganson had promised advancement but so far hadn’t delivered. That was one of the reasons David worked out so hard and diligently at Silver’s; an extra five pounds on the bench press, an extra push-up or sit-up, gave the illusion of advancement in life, even if all he really had to look forward to with certainty was another day of overseeing the critiquing of would-be authors’ manuscripts, which were usually sent back with kind and encouraging letters explaining why they were unsalable, but maybe next time, if the author learned from his or her mistakes and built on the invaluable experience of having written a novel. Yes, maybe next time.

  His musing had soured his mood, and it was too beautiful a day for that. He decided to eat lunch at a sit-down deli three blocks away.

  It was a nice walk. No one tried to sell him a Rolex watch or stuck a beggar’s cup in his face, burdening him with the guilt of the healthy and employed. A man with a huge dog wearing a kerchief around its neck was holding a sign asking for donations to buy booze for the dog. David thought that one was worth a dollar. It had to be a soul-smearing experience, begging in New York, even if you were working a scam.

  He’d finished building his salad and was standing in line to pay the deli’s cashier, when a woman spoke to him as if he were an old friend and she was surprised, though certainly not shocked, to run into him here.

  “Well, David! Hello!”

  The amazing thing was he didn’t know right away who’d spoken. Not quite recognizing the voice, though it was disturbingly familiar, he turned around, smiling, ready to bluff recognition if necessary.

  It wasn’t necessary.

  “Deirdre…” He said her name softly, his breath snatched away by whatever he was feeling. What was she doing here? Deirdre, his ex-wife, who lived in Saint Louis, a thousand miles away. You shouldn’t be here, was all he could think. He almost actually uttered the words.

  But there she was, standing behind him in line, wearing a gray, businesslike blazer and black skirt, slightly older now, but still, he had to admit, attractive. Almost as tall as his five-foot-ten, her head a mass of red hair he knew was unnatural, her smile bright and wide in a face that had grown somehow stronger. Her green eyes were sparkling with pleasure and something else beneath brows that seemed lighter than when she and David had lived, slept, and made love together. Her wide, full-lipped mouth was exactly the same as he remembered, a feral mouth that seemed always ready to bite, her upper lip sliding sensuously like the sheath of daggers over perfect, large white teeth when she smiled. He found himself staring at her lips and quickly returned his gaze to her eyes. A stranger’s eyes, a lover’s eyes.

  “It’s been…what, five years?” he asked, still stunned.

  “Closer to six,” she said. “You never did have a good sense of time.” She stepped back, gazing at him with obvious pleasure and disbelief. “This is amazing, running into you here! In a city the size of New York!”

  David couldn’t quite regain his mental equilibrium; he didn’t want to believe this was happening. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Hey, David!” she said. “You don’t seem glad to see me. We were a married couple once, remember? We can at least talk to one another. Don’t be afraid. You know me. I never did bite.” She smiled. “That is, unless you asked me to.”

  A bearded man in a gray business suit, standing ahead of David in line, had apparently been eavesdropping and turned to stare. Deirdre ignored him, holding her smile.

  David forced a return smile. “It’s not that I’m afraid, Deirdre. I’m just…well, surprised.” He tried to summon cheer that wouldn’t seem forced. “How long are you going to be in town?”

  “Only about a week. I’m an interior designer for a shoe company in Saint Louis, laying out their stores for maximum efficiency and eye appeal.”

  This wasn’t the Deirdre he remembered. He was amazed and must have shown it.

  “Don’t look so astounded, David,” she said with a grin. “I went back to school after our divorce. There are things we don’t know about each other. After all, six years is a lot of water through the dam.”

  “‘Over’ the dam, you mean.” Oops! He recalled ho
w she habitually mangled maxims and distorted platitudes. His corrections used to infuriate her. Maybe they still would.

  She laughed. “Oh, David. You’re still correcting me. I still say things like that a little bit wrong, get them tangled up. It’s just like we were still married.”

  The bearded man turned around again. This time Deirdre glared at him and he turned away.

  David was embarrassed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I had no business-”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she interrupted with a shrug. “I know I used to drive you crazy with my little flaws.”

  “Well, I wasn’t perfect myself.”

  “Almost, though.” She blatantly looked him up and down. “You look good, David. Bigger than I remember. You’re lifting weights, right?”

  He felt a rush of pleasure at the compliment. “Now and then. How’s your husband?” he asked quickly, to assuage his guilt over what was skirting the edges of his mind. “What’s his name? Sam?”

  “Stan,” she said. “Stan Grocci. He’s a building contractor. Puts up houses but does some commercial work, too.”

  “Any children?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She paused, looked down, then back up into his eyes. “David, Stan and I are divorced.”

  He was unsettled by the knowledge and didn’t know how he should react. What do you say when you find out your ex-wife is divorced again? “I’m, uh, sorry.” He was staring at her mouth.

  “Me, too. Stan’s a great guy, really and truly, but his business was his life. Is his life, I mean. He’s alive and healthy and doing well. I don’t want to make it sound as if he’s standing with one foot by the grave.”

  “‘In’ the-No, sorry, never mind. It’s my job making me do it, I guess. Bad habit, editing people when they talk.”

  The line at the cashier’s booth had edged forward. The bearded man in front of David paid the Oriental woman at the register and walked away carrying his lunch in its foam container.

  David balanced his own foam plate of salad and his soda can and reached for his wallet. Before he could draw it from his pocket, Deirdre had stepped forward and handed the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. “For both of us,” she said.

  “No, Deirdre,” David said, “really, let me-”

  “Lunch is on me, David,” she cut him off. “For other times’ sake. I’m an independent woman now.” She accepted her change from the cashier then stood up on her toes and peered across the deli. “Oh, there’s an open booth. Come on, let’s strike before the iron is hot.”

  She strode away, elbowing her way through the people still loading their foam plates at the long serving bar.

  David hesitated, then followed.

  They sat down across from each other in one of the wooden booths that lined the long, paneled walls, their lunches on the table before them. There were framed sports photographs on the walls. The one near their booth was an old black-and-white of Joe DiMaggio swinging mightily at a waist-high pitch, the muscles in his arms corded, his eyes trained calmly and intently on the blurred point of impact where bat met ball.

  Deirdre didn’t begin to eat, but instead stared as intently at David as DiMaggio stared at the baseball. David was getting uneasy.

  Then she looked away from him and began using a white plastic knife to spread mustard on her sandwich.

  “So,” she said, “you’re an editor.”

  “Not exactly,” David said. “I supervise fee readers at a literary agency. People send in manuscripts, and we’re paid to read them then write and tell the authors why their work isn’t salable.”

  Deirdre opened her mouth wide and attacked her sandwich in a way that was almost primal. “But you do sell them sometimes,” she said as she chewed.

  For a crazy moment he wondered if she fancied herself a writer and had a manuscript she wanted him to give special attention. Maybe that was what this was about; such things happened in his line of work. “Sometimes,” he said, “but not very often.”

  “Is it a big agency?”

  “One of the biggest.”

  She swallowed her bite of sandwich and licked her lips. “Well, I am impressed. All your reading in bed has paid off, and now you’re a big executive. I always knew you had brains, David.”

  “You never mentioned it at the time.”

  She reached across the table and touched the back of his hand with just the tips of her red-enameled nails. The touch felt like a brand. “No,” she admitted, “but I wish now that I had. I wish things had been different for us.”

  David felt a lump form in his throat. He had to swallow, so he took a sip of his soda to conceal his emotion. “I never did understand why you left me, Deirdre.”

  She shook her head slowly, as if in admonition. “That girl, David. She was barely out of her teens.”

  Marci, she was talking about. A twenty-two-year-old law student at Saint Louis University who’d lived in the same apartment building. David had always regarded their affair as more a result than a cause of his problems with Deirdre.

  “We were all younger then,” he said. “And I was serious when I told you she didn’t mean anything to me. She came on to me one day like she was crazy. It was something that happened and was meaningless, then it was over within a month.” He stared at his food. “I thought…Well, I thought you might have left me because I insisted on the abortion.” They hadn’t planned on having a child, had little money, and their marriage was clearly deteriorating at the time Deirdre told him she was pregnant. Abortion had seemed the only logical path to David then. He still wasn’t sure if he’d been right.

  “I didn’t want the abortion,” Deirdre said.

  David smiled sadly. “So you told me. Then, after you left me, you didn’t have to abort the pregnancy, but you chose to anyway.” He had always wondered why.

  Maybe she still wasn’t going to tell him. “Our marriage was about sex, wasn’t it? Honestly now, David.”

  “Not only about sex,” he said.

  “But mostly. You remember how we were. Rough with each other.”

  He did remember. They’d both been in some kind of dark sexual thrall, experimenting, trying anything, sadomasochism, bondage. He’d told himself the marriage was failing and he was trying to hold on to her that way, but on a certain level, he’d known better even then. She’d been the one who suggested many of their activities, but he’d enjoyed what they did, needed it.

  “The baby was injured, David. That was why I went ahead and had the abortion. It wouldn’t have been born normal.”

  What she was saying spread inside him like something black and heavy as he recalled the violence of their sex while she was pregnant. “Oh, Christ! Was it something we-something I did?”

  “No, not you, David,” she said. She touched his arm as if trying to lend comfort. “Someone else, after I left you. Can you forgive me?”

  “I’m the one who wanted the abortion,” he said. “Whatever happened wasn’t deliberate, and your life was your own then. There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “You’re a better man than I thought you were six years ago,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Well, the past is buried and dead.” She bowed her head, then suddenly looked up and seemed to brighten. Her eyes were green, wide, luminous with possibility. “Listen, David, why don’t you phone me at my hotel? We could get together for a drink. The world has changed for both of us, so maybe we’d both feel better if we talked without emotion about the past and future. We can be friends, I think.”

  Despite her toned-down appearance, there was sensuality in her every gesture. As she pursed her lips and sipped at her drink through a straw, he couldn’t look away from her despite his confusion and discomfort. He wished they hadn’t met again, yet he was still sexually attracted to her.

  “I don’t know…” he said.

  “If we can be friends?”

  “If it’s a good idea.”

  She appeared injured, then smiled. Her
wide, red lip slid up over her teeth, almost inverting. “Oh, I get it. The wife. Have you married again? Never mind, don’t answer. So what’s her name?”

  “Molly.” It felt almost like a sacrilege, using Molly’s name in Deirdre’s presence.

  “Hmm. I like that name,” Deirdre said. “Molly.”

  He didn’t like hearing her say it. Didn’t like the indecipherable emotion stirring in the corners of his mind where memory moldered. Memory he thought had been purged of emotion by time. But he’d been wrong. His chance meeting with Deirdre was dissipating the years as if they were mist, striking life into the past. Corpses were rising.

  “Molly’s young, I’ll bet.”

  “Twenty-seven. Only ten years younger than I am.”

  “Which would make her eleven years younger than me.”

  David smiled. “You robbed the cradle, Deirdre.”

  “Do you and Molly have any children?” she asked.

  “One. A boy. Michael. He’s three.”

  “That’s absolutely wonderful!” She did seem genuinely pleased.

  “We think it is.”

  “What does your Molly do?” Deirdre asked. “Other than wifely duties?”

  “She’s a freelance copy editor. Publishers farm out work to people like her, manuscripts that need help.”

  “Then you and she have your work in common.”

  “We have a lot of things in common.”

  “And Molly and I have something in common.” She made a face at her own faux pas. “I’m sorry, David. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  “I guess I’m the leopard that can’t change its skin.”

  David smiled. “There’s no real reason for you to change, Deirdre.”

  “Why, thank you! A compliment!” She seemed immensely pleased.

  “Maybe I should have given you more of them six years ago. God knows, I loved you enough.”

  “Nobody’s to blame for the past, David. Life teaches us all. Usually too late. Like I learned too late I shouldn’t have left you.”