The Ex

by John Lutz

  Plenty of other people in the building must have decided to go to lunch early. The elevator was packed. Everyone edged backward uneasily as Traci wedged her way inside far enough for the door to close.

  The elevator stopped again on the fifth floor, but the man and woman standing there wisely decided not to try to board.

  When the elevator reached the lobby, Traci was practically propelled out of it.

  The lobby was large, with street entrances at each end, and lined with shops. All hard, marble or wood surfaces, it echoed with footsteps and voices. It was crowded not only with the building’s occupants on their way to lunch, but with pedestrians cutting through to the next block.

  Traci was bumped by a large man in a blue suit. She made sure she still had her purse, then turned to make her way through the mass of people toward the East Fifty-sixth Street exit. A woman walking in the opposite direction, part of the flow of the crowd, caught her eye, but it took a few seconds for recognition to register on Traci.

  She stopped and looked in the direction the woman had gone, craning her neck. Almost at once she spotted the woman’s green dress only about twenty feet away.

  “Molly!” she called. “Mol!”

  The woman didn’t turn around. Instead she glanced at her wristwatch and began walking faster, elbowing her way through the crowded lobby.

  “Molly Jones!” Traci yelled. “Hey! Molly!”

  Still she wouldn’t turn around.

  Traci took a few running steps then stopped, realizing the hopelessness of trying to catch Molly or attract her attention. Actually breaking into a run in this mob was impossible, Traci thought; they were likely to turn on her if she tried. And maybe the woman wasn’t actually Molly. Traci really hadn’t gotten that good a look at her, and she’d been thinking about Molly because of Winston Delacort’s phone call.

  Either way, by now the woman would be out on East Fifty-fifth Street, lost in an even larger mass of people.

  Someone clutched Traci’s elbow.

  She jerked away with surprise, then turned and saw it was Beverly Malcolm from the art department.

  “Sorry, Trace,” Beverly said, dropping her hand from Traci’s arm. “Didn’t mean to stop your heart. I need to talk to you about that Civil War manuscript when you get back.”

  “Sure, Bev.”

  “Who were you shouting at?” Beverly asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. Somebody I thought I knew. Guess I was wrong”

  “Guess so. See you later.”

  “I’m going to lunch at a new place around Fifty-seventh and Lex,” Traci said. “They’re rumored to serve food with their drinks. You want to come?”

  “I’d like to, but I’ve got a meeting. Next time.”

  Traci nodded, then continued on her way toward the exit opposite the one used by the woman in the green dress.

  Molly stood before her closet and shuffled through her clothes, first slowly, then so fast that the wire hangers sang on the metal rod.

  She withdrew an empty hanger from the end of the closet she only half-jokingly thought of as her dress-up side, where her more stylish and expensive outfits hung.

  Feeling anger, puzzlement, and a creepy kind of fear that itself alarmed her, she stood holding the empty hanger and staring at it. She was positive it was where her green dress had hung.

  The dress that was definitely missing.

  The dress she was sure she’d seen Deirdre wearing earlier that day.

  33

  That evening, Molly watched David as they ate a dinner of pizza and salad delivered from William’s Takeout over on Amsterdam. He seemed preoccupied, worried in a manner he wouldn’t share with her. When she tried to enter and understand his concern, he would deflect her with inane conversation about work, or friends they hadn’t seen for weeks and sometimes months. It occurred to her that they hadn’t seen many people or gone out much with each other since Deirdre had arrived in New York.

  Molly waited until they’d had dinner and Michael was asleep before telling David about seeing Deirdre wearing her green dress.

  He sat in the chair opposite the sofa and stared at her in a way that angered her. As if she’d become ill and had great bleeding sores on her face and he was too polite to mention them.

  He obviously wasn’t going to say anything, so she would.

  “Dammit! Stop looking at me like that! I’m sure she was wearing my dress.”

  “But you told me you didn’t actually see her face.”

  “I saw the rest of her. I saw my dress.”

  Now he furrowed his brow in concern, adding a decade to his face. “Maybe you’re imagining things, Mol. You’ve been under a hell of a strain, you know.”

  “I also know what I saw.”

  She realized she was becoming more convinced as she spoke that the woman had been Deirdre; she was digging a foxhole in the face of David’s disbelief and patronizing patter. Well, maybe she was being defensive, but that didn’t alter what she’d seen this morning.

  He smiled and looked curious as well as concerned. Infuriating.

  “Why would Deirdre wear one of your dresses?” he asked.

  “Why would she wear my perfume?” Molly said in exasperation.

  “Anyone can buy any kind of perfume, Mol.”

  Molly stood up from the sofa. It made her feel better to be looking down at him. “Do not treat me as if I’m some kind of mental case. If Deirdre didn’t take the dress, then where is it?”

  He turned his hands palms up. “I don’t know. Maybe you forgot it at the cleaners.”

  “Come off it, David. I’d know if it was at the cleaners. I always put the receipts from the cleaners in the same place, under a magnet on the side of the refrigerator, so I remember to pick up whatever’s there. There are no receipts. Right now we have nothing at the cleaners.”

  “So maybe you misplaced the receipt. Or it somehow slipped out from under the magnet and fell beneath the refrigerator.”

  Molly shook her head no. “I had a dress, David. Now I’ve got a hanger.”

  He let his hands float up and then dropped them down on the chair arms. “Well, I don’t have an explanation, but the dress will turn up.”

  “Bullshit, David.”

  Instead of getting angry with her, he stood up from the chair and walked over to her. He hugged her, but she merely stood with her arms at her sides.

  After a brief, final squeeze, he released her and stepped back. He was looking straight into her eyes. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, when the situation called for it. Heart-to-heart time.

  “I don’t believe you’re a mental case,” he assured her. “But I do have a suggestion. I have a friend named Herb Mindle. A doctor.”

  It took Molly a second to realize what he meant. She was incredulous that he would suggest such a thing.

  “A shrink?”

  David pursed his lips in disapproval of her denigrating a noble profession. Looking pained, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them on, as if to read her more clearly.

  “You could talk to him, Mol. Maybe get something to help you through…whatever it is you’re going through.”

  “Oh, really?” She almost actually sneered.

  He acted as if he hadn’t noticed the sarcastic quality in her voice. “I mean, with Bernice’s death, everything else that’s happened, what could it hurt if you went and saw the man? He’s got a reputation as a superb analyst.”

  Molly had nothing against the art of analysis, but she certainly didn’t think she was in need of it. “No, David,” she said patiently, “I’m not going to a psychiatrist. It isn’t necessary.”

  “You can’t be the best judge of that, Mol.”

  “But I can be the only judge.”

  He pursed his lips again, then parted them and blew out air. She knew it was his way of showing disapproval along with his resignation. She was being unreasonable, he was telling her. “Okay, then. No it is.”

  “We won’t talk about it a
gain,” she said, driving home the finality of her decision.

  She went back to the sofa but didn’t sit down. Instead she picked up the folded Times then laid it back on the cushion, feigning casualness, putting the subject of Dr. Mindle behind them.

  Time to steer the conversation down another road.

  “I don’t like the way things have been going lately,” she said.

  “No one does,” David replied.

  She sat down in a corner of the sofa. “I meant with my work. Traci called about the architectural manuscript. The author’s going to make trouble.”

  “Some of them do,” David said. “He’s probably relying on the fact that he knows more about architecture than do you or Traci.”

  “That’s the problem. He’s an architect and not a writer. Everybody in this goddamned world is trying to be something or someone else.” Like that fucking Deirdre. “Have you noticed?”

  He smiled. “Oh, I’ve noticed.” He walked over and sat down a cushion away from her. “I do have some good news for you, Mol. The company that manages this building says we can move to another apartment it manages a few blocks from here without violating the terms of our lease. We have our choice of two. You can look at them tomorrow while I’m at work.”

  “That’s great,” Molly said. And she meant it. Here was a significant first step in the journey away from Deirdre. “But what makes you so hot to move all of a sudden?” she asked. “You were resisting the idea before as if I’d suggested a vasectomy.”

  “Was I? Well, I thought about it and came to the conclusion you were right. It’d be better for all of us if we got out of this building.”

  Molly wondered if his “all of us” included Deirdre, but she decided not to ask. Instead she moved over to him and kissed his cheek.

  “You said the right thing, David. That does more for me than Doctor whatever-his-name-is could possibly do.”

  He patted her hand. “I thought you’d feel that way about it. I’m glad.”

  When he stood up, she reached for the remote control that sat on one of the sofa arms, aimed it at the TV, and pressed the bright red power button.

  At the soft electronic pop the TV made when it came on, he turned suddenly. “What are you doing?”

  Molly was puzzled by his reaction. And by something in his voice. Fear? “I was going to get Channel One,” she said. “Catch up on the local news.”

  “Is Michael asleep yet?”

  “Maybe,” she said, wondering what this was about.

  “Let’s take him and go out someplace. Maybe walk down and get some ice cream. He loves to do that.”

  “But he’s in bed.”

  “So? How much trouble can it be to get him up? Hell, he can go in his pajamas. There are only so many chances in life to get ice cream. You’ve got to take them.”

  She wasn’t going to argue against that philosophy She pressed the remote’s power button again and the television went silent and dark.

  “Are you restless, David?” she asked. “Or is there some reason you don’t want me to watch the news?”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel like watching television tonight. Any kind of television.”

  From her window overlooking West Eighty-fifth Street, Deirdre watched David, carrying Michael, walking with Molly toward the lights of shops at the corner.

  They paused for Molly to adjust her shoe or sock, and David moved over to walk on the curb side. An unconsciously protective gesture, Deirdre thought with envy. She’d read somewhere that the custom dated back to when gentlemen walked closest to streets of mud to shield against ladies getting their dresses stained from the splashing of passing carriages. She narrowed her eyes and for an instant her lips arced in a tight, grim smile. Wouldn’t want little Molly to get soiled.

  She placed the side of her forehead against the warm glass, leaning forward and staring with fierce attention at them, clenching her teeth so that her jaw muscles danced. Her hands were clenched too, into tight fists that she leaned on against the wooden sill.

  When the Jones family was out of sight, Deirdre straightened up and stared down as she unclenched her fists. She’d dug her long fingernails into her flesh so deeply that her hands were bleeding. The blood on her palms reminded her of photos of stigmata, before she’d become a lapsed Catholic.

  Leaving the window, she went to a cardboard box and dug out a Bible she’d stolen from a motel room outside Saint Louis. Then she went into the kitchen and got a sharp knife.

  She sat down in the living room and began methodically slashing the Bible’s pages, tossing them to the floor with abandon when they separated from the binding.

  When she was finished, she gathered up the pages and the mutilated fake leather Bible jacket, carried them in to the kitchen sink, then burned them.

  The forsaken, the truly lost, obeyed only their own commandments.

  It was almost midnight when Molly loomed over David. She’d removed her sleep shirt and panties and stood nude next to the bed, trailing a corner of her silk scarf lightly over his cheek.

  She grinned as he swiped at the scarf with his hand, then opened his eyes and saw her in the dim light.

  “Mol?” There was surprise in his voice. And, she thought, anticipation.

  She bent lower and kissed him then, reached down and felt him between the legs. His penis was flacid now, but she could change that. The really sensual sexual organ was the brain, and she was going to enter David’s mind tonight even if he thought it was the other way around.

  Standing up straight, she used both hands to twirl the scarf into a taut twist of smooth material. Then she smiled. “How about tying my hands and feet, lover? Would you like that?”

  He paused, then surprised her.

  “Not tonight, Mol. Not that kind of game.”

  “You’ve played that kind of game before.”

  He almost sat up, as if she’d alarmed him.

  “Remember? The lodge in Maine?”

  “Ah, yeah.” He seemed to relax. “No forgetting that.”

  Puzzled, she stared at him. “You want me to tie you up?”

  “No.”

  “Something wrong, David?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The way things have gone lately, I thought you might want me to spice up our bedroom time.”

  He reached up and grabbed the scarf, hurting her finger as the material was wrenched from her grasp, then threw it across the room into shadow.

  She was stunned. Confused. “Jesus, David! There’s no reason to get mad.”

  He lay very still for a while, not answering. Then he cupped a hand behind her head and pulled her down to him. She resisted, still unsure and angry. But this was at least some reaction from him. And she needed that, dammit, she needed it! She let the strength drain from her as he kissed her.

  He smiled at her with something like regret. She thought he was going to apologize for snatching away the scarf, but he didn’t. “Nothing needs spicing up where you’re concerned, Mol. I’m just not into that kind of stuff anymore.”

  She kissed his forehead, then his lips. “You used to be adventuresome in sex. Used to get a little kinky from time to time. I never minded that. I liked it.”

  “So did I, but I don’t feel adventuresome tonight.”

  She settled back down beside him in the bed.

  Within a few minutes, his hand brushed her nipple, then moved lower. As his finger found its familiar spot and began its subtle rotation, he rolled toward her, craning his neck, and his lips warmly encircled the nipple that still tingled from his touch.

  “Plain vanilla, David,” she said, half-jokingly.

  Only half-jokingly.

  34

  A light rain was falling the next morning as Molly delivered Michael to Julia beneath the canopy in front of Small Business.

  “Going to rain all day, Michael,” Julia said, lifting him from his stroller and hugging him. “But not on us.” He seemed to enjo
y the irony of that and grinned.

  Molly turned up the collar of her yellow raincoat and adjusted Michael’s waterproof miniature windbreaker when Julia set him down. She kissed him. “Be a good boy for Julia.”

  “Michael’s always good,” Julia said. Her gaze went beyond Molly to a black minivan that had pulled to the curb. A woman climbed out and opened a sliding door in the side of the van to reveal three preschoolers strapped into their seats.

  “Two of them are mine,” Julia said, possessive about her young charges. “I’ll get the littlest one next year.”

  For a moment Molly and Julia watched the woman lean into the van and begin struggling with safety belts, rattles, and galoshes.

  “Family must be a wonderful thing,” Julia said, watching the woman and her children.

  At first Molly thought she might be kidding, but when she saw the longing on Julia’s face, she knew better. Julia actually envied the woman.

  “It is wonderful,” Molly said. “Someday you’ll know, Julia.”

  “That’s what my husband and the doctor tell us. I guess I might as well believe them. And you.”

  “You’ll see that we’re right.”

  “We keep hoping. That’s what there is to life-hope and family.”

  “That sounds about right,” Molly said.

  She kissed Michael again and went down the steps to where she’d left the stroller.

  As she pushed the stroller along the sidewalk, away from Small Business, she felt the light rain work its way beneath her collar. She paused and opened her umbrella, then continued on her way, not looking back.

  Behind her, Deirdre, in a yellow raincoat, had approached Small Business from the opposite direction. She patted Michael on the head and chatted for a few minutes with Julia and the woman from the van. Then she lifted Michael, kissed him, and handed him back to Julia.

  Later that morning, in Midnight Espresso on Broadway, Molly sat across from Traci at one of the small, round marble tables. The coffee shop was crowded, especially around the counter and displays of gourmet brands, but Traci had managed to get a table in a corner, away from the press of other patrons, where there was elbow room and it was relatively quiet.