The Ex

by John Lutz

  She moved up against him. He started to back away. Paused and stood still.

  “How did you get in here?” he asked. “I mean now, this morning?”

  Smiling, she inserted her hand beneath the elastic waistband of his shorts. He felt her fingers twine around his limp penis and begin their slow and expert pulsing motion, somehow in time with his heartbeat. “Oh, I guess I must have found a key someplace.”

  He had an erection; he couldn’t prevent it. It wasn’t his fault!

  “Or took an impression and had a key made,” he said.

  She continued to smile and press her body against his, increasing pressure and backing him toward the bedroom. He was surprised by her strength. She had to have very powerful legs to generate that kind of force.

  “No,” he said, with some determination, not loudly enough to disturb Michael. “We’re not going to do this.”

  “Of course we are,” she persisted.

  “No, we’re not going to do it here! Especially not in our bed!”

  She maintained pressure against him, snaking her free arm around his body to reach the plastic cassette he was holding and tapping it with her long red nails. “Aren’t we really?”

  “Listen, Deirdre! We have to talk!”

  “Shhh, David! We don’t want to wake Michael!”

  “Jesus, Deirdre, we can’t do that here!” He was whispering now, pleading. “Not now! Not here!”

  They were at the threshold, then past it. He felt Deirdre’s body move against him and heard the door shut and latch. She’d adroitly closed it with her foot.

  “Damn it, Deirdre!”

  Laughing, she shoved hard against him, forcing him backward faster, gaining momentum until they both fell onto the bed.

  The springs squealed loudly under the sudden weight of two people.

  They continued to squeal.

  When Molly returned from her run, she dropped the fat Times on the sofa, then noticed the remote on the floor. She picked it up and laid it on top of the VCR.

  Then she walked to the bedroom door and opened it.

  David was still in bed asleep. He must have gotten up during her absence, though probably only to use the bathroom. The window was wide open and the air conditioner next to it was humming away on high, not the work of a man all the way awake.

  She looked down at him lying there with the sheet tucked beneath his chin, and she smiled. She was still perspiring from her run but she looked and felt invigorated. Hurriedly, she removed all her clothes except for her jogging shoes, then climbed into bed.

  David sighed and turned his head to the side, not opening his eyes. She drew back the sheet and gripped the waistband of his shorts, then laboriously worked them down over his buttocks, genitals, knees, then feet, and tossed them on the floor. Amazingly, he still hadn’t awakened.

  She gently prodded his shoulder. He was sweating even though the room was cool. Or maybe she only thought it was cool because she was still warm from her run.

  “Hey, you,” she said softly, prodding again.

  He opened his eyes and stared over at her. “Huh? Hey, I thought I was dreaming.”

  She grinned. “Want something better than a dream?”

  He wiped at his eyes then worked the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I don’t really feel like it anymore, Mol. Got too much on my mind.”

  Still grinning, she encircled his limp maleness with her hand and began manipulating, stroking. “It’s a mind that can be changed.”

  It took a few minutes, but he responded to her.

  “See,” she said. “Grab them there, and their hearts and minds are sure to follow.”

  Not releasing him, she settled down beside him, her face close to his.

  “There’s an interesting thing about running,” she said. “If you’re in the right frame of mind, it can be foreplay. Something to do with endorphins, maybe.”

  He sighed and rolled toward her. Maybe he was readier than either of them had known.

  The bedsprings began their rhythmic squeal.

  When Deirdre had returned to her apartment, Darlene was still seated on the sofa, drinking coffee from a cup with a yellow rose design that Deirdre had bought at a shop in the Village. She was wearing a stylish green dress and had her slender legs crossed and twined about each other modestly. The kind of chaste, perfect woman some men liked to muss up, Deirdre thought.

  “I told you I wouldn’t be gone long,” Deirdre said.

  Darlene smiled and shook her head. “You are really something else.”

  Deirdre picked up the other cup on the table and sipped. The coffee was cold. “Want a warm-up?” she asked.

  Darlene shook her head again. “Just got one.”

  Deirdre went into the kitchen, refilled her cup from the glass pot, then returned to the living room.

  “You were gone long enough to get into mischief,” Darlene said, “considering that you were visiting your ex-husband while his wife was away.”

  “For crying out loud, Darlene, little Michael was right there in the apartment. Nothing happened.”

  Darlene’s large, dark eyes shifted as her gaze traveled up and down Deirdre. “Your clothes are mussed.”

  “You’re not my mother,” Deirdre said.

  Darlene sighed. “Sorry. I was being judgmental again.”

  “You want to listen to some music?” Deirdre asked. She walked over to the stereo, anticipating Darlene’s answer.

  “Sure. If you don’t want to talk about your visit with David.”

  “Do you like the Beatles?” Deirdre asked, thumbing through her box of audiocassettes.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  She looked over at Darlene, surprised that she’d expressed a sense of humor. Usually she was so serious.

  “You’re frowning,” Darlene said. “Put the cassette in and relax.”

  “Okay, I deserve some relaxation. It’s been a hard day’s night.”

  Now it was Darlene who frowned.

  By the time the music began, Deirdre was seated next to Darlene on the sofa. They began talking animatedly, sometimes laughing so hard that Darlene’s hand would shake and her coffee would spill onto her green skirt.

  The Beatles declared that they all lived in a yellow submarine.

  Later that day, David exited the apartment, leaving the door unlatched behind him as he strode quickly to the end of the corrldor.

  Ignoring the white framework of PVC pipes that supported bags labeled PLASTIC and ALUMINUM, he glanced around to make sure he was alone. Preserving the environment was the last thing on his mind. Self-preservation had brought him here.

  He removed Deirdre’s videocassette from beneath his shirt and quickly dropped it down a chute whose steel door was lettered INCINERATOR.

  Then he hurried back to the apartment before Molly realized he was gone.

  31

  Chumley stood that night in the arched stone doorway of the building across the street from Deirdre’s apartment. He was wearing a blue shirt, gray pants, and his clunky walking shoes. In the darkness, he was almost invisible in the shadowed doorway.

  He didn’t know exactly what to expect from his vigil, but curiosity about Deirdre had driven him there. So far all it had netted him were a few glimpses of her as she passed her living room window, a traversing image that had entered his life and made him alternatingly ecstatic and uneasy.

  Maybe he should leave, he thought. The night was warm and the air in the doorway was still. A swarm of gnats had found him and seemed to regard pestering him as the purpose of their brief lives, flitting about his eyes and nostrils, making him itch.

  He was vigorously scratching an elbow when a motion across the street caught his eye.

  Deirdre emerged not from the street door, but from the narrow walkway alongside the building. Chumley knew from helping her move that it led to a side entrance and the service elevator. She was wearing slacks, and what appeared to be a light sweater despite the heat. And she wa
s pushing something.

  Chumley glanced up and saw that her apartment’s windows had gone dark. He should have noticed earlier; he’d been distracted by the gnats.

  As she moved quickly away from the building and passed beneath a streetlight, he saw that what she was pushing ahead of her on the sidewalk was a baby stroller.

  She began rolling the empty stroller at a slower pace. Staying on the opposite side of the street, Chumley followed.

  Near Columbus, she stopped in front of a small combination grocery store and deli. She glanced around, collapsed the small, portable stroller, then went inside.

  Chumley took up position across the street from the deli and waited.

  So she was going shopping, he figured, and used the stroller to carry her groceries. But why had she exited her apartment building from the side door and walked through the narrow, dark gangway? It was a place most women would avoid. And there had been, Chumley was sure, something definitely furtive about her manner.

  Ten minutes later she pushed the stroller out onto the sidewalk. In its cloth seat sat a brown paper grocery sack with what appeared to be the leafy end of a cluster of celery stalks jutting up from one side at an angle.

  Chumley walked a few steps toward the corner, then turned and began trailing her back along West Eighty-fifth Street toward her apartment. He watched her pause and bend forward from time to time, as if something about the groceries or stroller demanded her attention.

  He took a chance and moved closer, to where he could look across the street at an angle that enabled him to see what was happening. She pushed the stroller another fifty feet, paused, then bent forward over it again, her grip still on its handles. Chumley saw with surprise that she was smiling, and she seemed to be talking. Yes, undeniably her lips were moving as if she were talking to whatever was in the paper sack.

  His mood plunged. Surely there was an explanation. Maybe she had a reason, a puppy or some other sort of pet in the bag. Possibly a goldfish.

  But he doubted that a store specializing in take-out food and groceries would sell any kind of fish not destined for the dinner plate.

  Chumley was familiar enough with people who talked to imaginary companions, as was everyone living in New York, and passed them on the sidewalk almost every day. Schizophrenics who carried their own vocal agonies inside their heads, who should be receiving treatment instead of roaming or begging on the streets. But it shook Chumley to think that Deirdre might secretly be one of those people. He preferred to believe that if he asked her about tonight, she’d laugh and offer an easy explanation that hadn’t entered his mind.

  When she reached her building, she rolled the stroller into the dark walkway without hesitation, as if confident that any waiting predator, and not she, would be in danger. Chumley wouldn’t have walked into that black maw with such resolution. He was impressed by her bravery.

  He stood for a while waiting for her apartment lights to come back on. Then he saw her walking from the dark gangway. The stroller was gone and she was carrying the sack of groceries.

  He watched her push open the glass doors and enter the building’s lobby.

  The elevator door opened immediately when she pressed the Up button. She stepped inside, punched her floor button, then stood leaning against the elevator’s back wall, clutching her groceries to her breast and staring in the direction of the street.

  Chumley was sure the bright lobby’s reflections on the glass doors would prevent her from seeing him out on the sidewalk, across the street and on the other side of a row of parked cars. He watched as the elevator door smoothly closed, cutting her from his view.

  Her actions confused him, and made him even more uneasy about the irregularity in the files.

  On the other hand, what had he actually seen? A woman pushing a baby stroller, then buying groceries and using the stroller to convey them to her apartment. It didn’t compute that she’d store the stroller someplace in the building’s basement, compact and portable as it was, and come and go via the service entrance. But then there was so much in life that didn’t compute if you really stopped to think about it.

  She’d paused here and there on the sidewalk and done a little talking to herself, but was that a crime? And was talking to yourself even so unusual these days? Maybe what he was doing was technically a crime, stalking her. Only he knew his true motives, and they’d be difficult to describe to strangers in an official setting

  Chumley considered dropping in unexpectedly on her for a visit, perhaps asking her about the walk with the stroller, about the files.

  But he’d seen her sudden anger and didn’t want to provoke her again.

  He stood in the shadows on West Eighty-fifth Street and stared for a while, puzzled. Her apartment lights came on again, but the living room drapes drew closed without him catching sight of her.

  He slapped at the gnats, who’d patiently awaited his return, then he shrugged elaborately and walked away.

  Molly pushed the empty stroller along West Eighty-fifth Street the next morning, after dropping off Michael at Small Business. Traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were teeming with people on their way to Monday morning work.

  There was a store nearby that had a coupon sale on Healy’s Cat Gourmet Meatloaf, the only brand Muffin would eat-in various flavors, of course. Molly needed some other groceries, so she thought this was a good morning to buy them, at the same time stocking up on cat food for the week and hoping Muffin wouldn’t suddenly decide to switch brands.

  She was waiting for the traffic light to change at Columbus when she noticed a woman in a green dress entering a clothing store across the street.

  Molly stiffened behind the stroller.

  The woman had looked familiar.

  So had the dress.

  The light read WALK and the knot of people at the corner began to move. Molly sped up and shot out ahead of most of them, pushing the stroller so fast that the rhythmic squeal of one of its wheels was almost a steady scream.

  She crossed to the other side of Columbus and hurried to the clothing shop she’d seen the woman in the green dress enter. The sign in its window boasted that it sold both men’s and women’s quality irregulars and seconds.

  Molly peered through the window at the racks of clothes.

  Damn it! Deirdre, or at least the woman Molly had seen enter the shop, was nowhere in sight.

  Quickly she collapsed the stroller, lifted it by its light aluminum frame, and went inside. It was possible that the woman had exited the shop unseen while Molly was crossing the intersection, but Molly didn’t think so.

  The shop’s interior was somewhat dim, and crowded with racks of clothing, but it took Molly only a few minutes to look around and conclude that she and an elderly woman in Plus Sizes were the only customers.

  “Help you?” a blond sales clerk in her twenties asked.

  “I’m looking for a friend I’m sure I saw come in here,” Molly said. “But now I don’t see her. Is anyone in the changing room?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

  “Would you look, please?”

  The girl stared at her for a few seconds, then walked away toward a curtained doorway at the back of the store.

  Less than a minute later she returned. “There’s no one in any of the changing rooms, ma’am. Like I told you, no one.”

  Molly thanked her and returned to the street and the warm morning sun.

  No one.

  Had she imagined she’d seen the woman? Seen the green dress that was like Molly’s dress or was Molly’s dress, and one of David’s favorites on her? Was she hallucinating these days?

  She unfolded the stroller, locked its handle into place, and continued rolling it toward the grocery store.

  Next I’ll be hearing voices, she thought.

  A man walking past glanced uneasily at her, and she realized she’d unconsciously spoken.

  Talking to myself now, she thought with some alarm.

  Maybe that was
the step before hearing voices.

  32

  Traci Mack hung up the phone and sat back in her desk chair. Around her in her small office at Link Publishing were stacks of manuscripts, her computer, some shelves of published books she’d edited. A sign behind her desk said IF YOU CAN’T LEAD AND YOU DON’T WANT TO FOLLOW, SIT DOWN AND LET’S TALK.

  She’d just been on the phone with Winston Delacort, the author of Architects of Desire. He’d called to complain about Molly’s breaking up his run-on sentences in the portion of the copyedited manuscript Traci had sent him to work on. He maintained that the prose was more fluent his way and better able to express architectural lines. Traci had been diplomatic, but she felt like sending one of Link’s hard-boiled crime writers to bump off Winston Delacort.

  But that wasn’t the way the game was played. Instead, she would talk to Molly about fixing the run-on sentences by inserting conjunctions whenever possible. A safe, middle-of-the-road solution that should leave everyone only slightly miffed. That kind of philosophy had come to Traci early enough to help her professional life, but she still hadn’t gotten around to applying it to her personal affairs.

  She leaned forward and used a pencil eraser to peck out Molly’s number.

  The phone rang six times without an answer.

  Traci hung up. She’d try again this afternoon, after lunch. Or maybe she’d talk to Molly about this the next time they met. She was almost finished with the manuscript anyway, and what were a few more revisions, one way or the other? They were slightly ahead of the production schedule now, thanks to Molly’s fast and reliable job on the manuscript, and the art department supplying a jacket illustration that had thrilled Winston Delacort.

  She slid the manuscript she’d been reading into a drawer then stood up to leave. There was a new restaurant over on Lexington she wanted to try. Well, it was more of a bar, really. But they did serve food.

  She told Jock the receptionist she was leaving for lunch, then pushed through the heavy wooden door out into the hall and walked to the elevators.