The Ex (15 page)

David was still asleep in bed, lying on his stomach with his upper body above the sheet and an arm draped down so that the backs of his knuckles rested on the floor. He was snoring lightly.

Molly bent over near the bed and slipped her feet into her jogging shoes. She was already dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, ready for her Sunday morning run. When she sat on the edge of the mattress to tie her shoes, the springs squealed loudly, waking David.

He raised his head like a newborn, turned it, and saw her seated on the foot of the bed.

“Going running?” he asked in a sleep-thickened voice.

“Sure am. Michael’s still in bed. He’ll probably sleep till I get back.”

David yawned and let his head plop back down so his face was mushed sideways into his pillow. “I won’t wake him, that’s for sure. Wanna pick up a Sunday
Times
on your way home?”

“Sure.” She gave the lace on her left shoe an extra tug to be positive it was tight, then stood up. “Coffee’s made, if you’re interested.”

“Definitely am for later.”

She walked around to his side of the bed and kissed his forehead. “Bye.”

He smiled into his pillow. “Don’t wear yourself out. I might have some interesting plans for you when you come back.” He rolled onto his back and she saw that beneath the sheet he had an erection.

She had other things on her mind. He reached for her but she sidled out of range of his sweeping, grasping arm and hand, his movements still slowed by sleep.

“Remember,” she said, “we have an appointment with a real estate agent this morning.”

“Time for everything…” he muttered drowsily, then rolled over onto his stomach again and closed his eyes.

She moved to the other side of the room so he wouldn’t see her if he did open his eyes; no point in encouraging him. She did a few quick squats and touched her toes several times to loosen her hamstrings, then left him asleep again and beginning to snore.

David had dozed off and wasn’t sure how long Molly had been gone when a sudden burst of sound—loud voices from the living room—caused him to wake suddenly.

What the hell?

He lay staring at the wall, trying to figure out what was happening. Then he realized the voices were coming from the televlsion.

Silence then. A loud moan.

He propped himself up on his elbows, then sat on the edge of the mattress. Maybe Michael was up, playing with the remote control. They’d warned him about that, but it hadn’t done much good.

David stood up and caught sight of himself in the dresser mirror, a disheveled man in white jockey shorts and under-shirt. He looked and felt vulnerable.

With equal parts of curiosity and trepidation, he crept toward the now silent living room.

The TV was on, all right. He stopped, leaning with a hand against the wall, and focused his bleary eyes on the screen. A man and woman were having sex on a bed. The man, who was on top, was thrusting madly into the woman. He planted his palms on the mattress and raised his upper body, pushing his pelvis harder into the soft saddle of the woman’s crotch and spread thighs. The woman clutched him with her arms, and her upper body rose with his as she clawed at his back.

David felt his insides go numb as he stared in shock. He was looking at himself and Deirdre.

“You’ve improved with age, David. Like fine whiskey.”

Her voice hadn’t come from the TV. He turned and saw her seated in a corner of the sofa with her legs curled beneath her, holding the remote control aimed casually and inaccurately at the TV. She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and obviously new red and white jogging shoes. The shoes were exactly like Molly’s.

David thought of Michael and an edge of fear knifed through him. “For God’s sake, turn that off! Michael’s in the—”

But Michael wasn’t in the next room. He was toddling into the living room, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

David rushed to him and scooped him up, barely managing to cover his eyes before he could see the TV screen. His breath hissing with anger, he carried Michael back to his bedroom, laid him in his bed, and kissed him and soothingly urged him back to sleep.

When he left the bedroom a few minutes later, he carefully closed the door behind him, wishing there were some way to lock it.

How had this happened? he wondered as he returned furious to the living room. Why was she doing this?

He stopped in the middle of the room as he heard Michael begin to cry.

Deirdre stared at him, used the remote to switch off the TV, then nonchalantly stood up and walked over and ejected a cassette from the VCR.

Michael’s muted cries were still coming from the bedroom. Sleepy, urgent wails.

Deirdre seemed not to hear them. “The darndest thing’s happened, David. You know that apartment where we made love? The one that belongs to the man who sells electronics? Well, he must be some kind of a pervert. One of us somehow must have accidentally touched something, and everything we did was recorded on videotape.”

David wasn’t ready yet to try grasping the significance of what she’d said. He glanced nervously toward Michael’s bedroom. “You expect me to believe that?”

She put on a surprised expression. “Of course. It’s not unheard of. He probably tapes himself and the women he brings there. Or maybe even men.”

Michael’s cries became softer and less frequent, then ceased.

Relieved, David said, “Give me the tape, Deirdre.”

“Sure. That’s why I brought it here. I saw Molly leave to go jogging and figured it was a good time.”

She came to him and handed him the cassette. When he accepted it, she kissed him on the lips, clinging to him. He broke her hold and pushed her away, but she seemed to have expected that and stayed close.

“Watching it kind of got me in the mood again,” she said. “You should see it before you destroy it. We’re absolutely terrific together.”

David, not only wide awake now but hyperalert, knew why she’d unhesitatingly given him the tape. He stared at the cassette in his hand, then stared at Deirdre. “My God, there are copies, aren’t there?”

She kissed him again, quickly, while he was still in shock and assimilating what was happening. He didn’t respond. He was too stricken by events even to resist.

She cocked her head to the side and flipped her hair as if she were in a shampoo commercial. “Copies? Well, I don’t know for sure.”

“I do,” he said in a voice that betrayed his resignation.

She moved in and kissed him a third time, smiling up at him. “Michael’s gone back to sleep,” she said, “or he’d be in here again by now.”

His mind was still trying to gain equilibrium, to reassess the future. “Molly told me about the incident with Michael and the cat.”

She gave him another of her nimble, unexpected kisses, this time on the point of his chin. “She certainly made more of it than there was, David.”

“She said you’d been in our bedroom. That you were wearing some of her perfume when she went up to your apartment.”

“Anyone can buy any kind of perfume. She’s imagining things again, David. She’s awfully insecure and she imagines things. I noticed that about her from the beginning, and like I told you, it’s getting worse.”

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.

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 was 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.