The Ex (4 page)

Molly backhanded perspiration from her forehead and squinted against the morning sun. Summer continued its relentless assault on the city. She thought it might be hot enough to buckle the sidewalk as she wheeled Michael in his stroller along West Eighty-fifth Street. Small Business was close enough to walk to, but since Michael had become more active lately, it was easier for both of them if she pushed him in the stroller rather than pursue him in his sudden and impulsive rovings. Trash bags and sidewalk grates drew him with irresistible power.

Manhattan’s steel and concrete held and radiated the heat like a kiln. Michael seemed comfortable enough, leaning back and calmly watching the traffic and occasional smiles of pedestrians, his chubby right hand idly toying with the colored plastic beads strung conveniently within his reach. His small world was in order; beads properly aligned and easily movable, surroundings familiar.

She noticed her own hands were clenched on the stroller handle. Relaxing her grip, bending her elbows slightly to remove tension, she leaned easily into the weight of the stroller, listening to the soft, rhythmic squeak of one of its front wheels, holding her breath whenever she caught a whiff of garbage from the plastic bags lined at the curb.

Halfway to Small Business, Molly glanced across the street and realized she was looking at the same woman who’d been strolling parallel to them for several blocks. Not unusual in New York, but the woman was diametrically opposite Molly and must have been keeping pace with her almost to the step. There was something eerie about it. If anything, she should have been moving faster than Molly and Michael, since Molly was leisurely pushing the stroller.

The woman was slender, wearing jeans, a tan windbreaker, and a blue baseball cap. She had on sunglasses with mirror lenses that concealed her eyes and altered her features like a mask.

A horn blasted and Molly jerked and stopped the stroller so abruptly that Michael slumped forward and yelped in surprise.

“Eye on the road, lady!” the driver of a dirt-streaked white delivery van yelled at her.

“Outa the street!” someone else shouted.

She realized she’d been so intent on watching the woman across the street that she’d pushed the stroller down the handicapped ramp at the corner, into the busy intersection. They might have been killed.

Relieved but embarrassed, she backed the stroller up onto the sidewalk. Several women in business clothes, and a man carrying an artist’s flat, vinyl portfolio tucked beneath his right arm and pressed close to his body, moved around her to stand near the street while waiting for the traffic light to change. One of the women, who was elderly and had strikingly blue eyes and bad teeth, looked over her shoulder and winked at Michael, who paid her no attention. Everyone was still, poised for the change of the light while they stood breathing exhaust fumes. It worried Molly that Michael, who was on a lower level than adults, breathed so much Manhattan pollution.

The light flashed a walk sign, imposing another electronic instruction on the conditioned New Yorkers staring in anticipation. Molly went with the flow of pedestrians and wheeled the stroller across the street and onto the opposite sidewalk.

Then she steered the stroller into a pocket of comparative calm near a restaurant’s doorway, propped Michael up straighter in his seat, and peered across the street.

The woman in the tan jacket was nowhere in sight.

Fine, Molly thought. She pushed the woman out of her consciousness and pressed on to Small Business.

When she reached the refurbished four-story building near Broadway, she saw that the usual signs of activity—the arrival and departure of parents’ cars as they dropped their children off before work—had already taken place. Julia Corera, Michael’s teacher, was standing halfway down the concrete steps to the entrance, beneath the green canvas canopy with its teddy bear design. She was wearing a baggy khaki skirt and a loose-fitting blouse with a wild, tropical plant pattern. There were already crescents of dampness beneath the arms of the blouse.

“Yo, there, Big Mike,” she said with a wide smile. She was a heavyset, sweet-faced woman in her mid-twenties, with a perfect mocha-cream complexion and wise brown eyes. She’d heard during the first week of preschool how David referred to his son, and from then on the irony of the nickname had prompted her to use it.

Molly unstrapped Michael, lifted him from the stroller, and stood him on the sidewalk. “Say hello to Miss Corera, Michael.”

He grinned and craned his neck, staring up the steps. “Hewo, Yulia.”

Julia bounded down the steps and picked him up. Molly wondered if Michael was her favorite or if she was equally smitten with all the children. She’d talked to Julia enough to know that she and her husband, a city fireman, wanted their own children but so far hadn’t had any luck.

“Sorry we’re late,” Molly said.

“That’s okay. It’s only a couple of minutes.” Julia flexed her knees and bounced slightly, jostling Michael. He laughed and tried to grab her ear. “If Michael ever runs away from home,” she said, “he can stay with me.”

Molly laughed. “You might send him right back.”

“Never!”

Molly kissed her son on the cheek. “See you this afternoon, honey.”

“Say bye-bye,” Julia prompted.

Michael opted for silence, but he smiled and waved to Molly as she paused pushing the unoccupied stroller along the sidewalk and glanced back. A man and woman passing by gazed at him as if he were the most beautiful child they’d ever seen, making Molly almost sob with pride.

Julia and Michael waved to her in unison, then a red Volvo pulled to the curb and a man climbed out on the passenger’s side and ushered a girl about three over to Julia. Molly had seen the girl at the school before and thought her name was Margaret.

She watched until everyone was inside the building. The car sat at the curb with its engine idling, a woman behind the steering wheel waiting patiently for the man to emerge. Another family’s day beginning. Molly stopped staring and continued down the street.

This was her day not to jog, and she had the architectural manuscript well under control. She decided to take a walk, then stop at the grocery store near the apartment. Muffin was out of cat food. She’d buy that and a few other things to load into the stroller before going home and settling down to work.

David draped his suit coat over the wooden valet in a corner of his office. It was a large office, with crowded shelves of books and manuscripts lining two walls above desk level. David’s desk was almost bare, but there was a side table with an IBM clone computer and a stack of manuscripts with letters paperclipped to them. Among the few items on the desk was a framed photograph of Molly and Michael. From where he sat, he could see into the anteroom, where the door lettered
STERLING MORGANSON LITERARY AGENCY
was open.

After sitting down at his desk, David swiveled his chair to face the computer and booted it up, then checked his e-mail. Nothing urgent. He decided to answer some letters on paper and keyed into the word processing program.

Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see that fee reader Josh Quinby had entered the office. Josh was in his late twenties, short and not quite overweight, curly-haired, with a mischievous grin. One of those people who become everyone’s buddy within minutes. Sometimes that kind of ongoing joviality masked less admirable character traits, but as long as he’d known Josh, David hadn’t seen anything other than genuineness. Josh actually was good-natured and mischievous. And everyone’s buddy.

Josh stared at him with concern. “You look like Gatsby near the end, old sport. What’s wrong?”

“That any way to talk to your boss?” David asked with mock annoyance.

Josh grinned and shrugged. “Sorry, boss. Now you can go ahead and promote me.”

David didn’t mind Josh’s flip manner. They were friends, and Josh was his fastest and best fee reader. Josh was also his confidant sometimes, and David needed someone to talk to about what was happening.

“I ran into my ex-wife in a deli yesterday,” he said. “After six years, I hear her voice call my name, I turn around, and there she is. It was like meeting a ghost.”

“And?” Josh said, his dark eyes sparkling with interest.

“She wants me to call her.”

Josh leaned his back against the doorjamb and ran a finger along his chin. “Hmm. You must have married for a reason, and you must have divorced for a reason. Maybe even the same reason. Did
you
leave her?”

“Vice versa,” David said.

“Oh. Then I suppose the question is, did you ever let her go? I mean, all the way?”

“Yes,” David said immediately. Then added, “I think so, anyway.”

“Then give her a call,” Josh said. “Put your mind at ease.”

Lisa Emmons, the receptionist and fee reader secretary, stepped into the office, smiled at David, then said, “Morganson wants to see you, Josh.”

Josh grimaced, but he was grinning as he left the office. Lisa, a small, intense woman of thirty, attractive with brown hair and eyes, glanced back at David as she left, but he didn’t notice. She was five years out of Columbia with an MBA degree, and he knew she periodically looked for other, more rewarding employment. What he didn’t know was that he was the reason she stayed at Sterling Morganson.

He got up and closed the door, then pulled the scrap of paper with Deirdre’s phone number from his pocket and stared at it for a moment.

He returned to the desk and sat down, dragged the phone over to him, then pecked out the number with his middle finger.

“Windemeyer Hotel,” said a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Could you ring the room of Deirdre…” He suddenly stopped talking, wondering what name she was using. “Deirdre Grocci,” he said, figuring she might still be using her ex-husband’s name.

After a pause, the operator came back on the line. “We don’t have a Deirdre Grocci registered, sir.”

“Maybe she’s using her maiden name,” David said. “Try Deirdre Chandler.”

Again a pause, longer. Then: “We have no Deirdre Chandler registered either, sir. We do have a Deirdre Jones.”

David was bewildered. “Would you ring her room, please.”

He waited while the phone rang six times.

“Your party doesn’t answer, sir,” the operator cut in. “Do you want to leave a message?”

“No,” David said. “No message. I don’t really need to get in touch with her.”

After hanging up the phone, he sat still. His hands were sweating. After a few minutes, he reached out and adjusted the photo of Molly holding Michael so that it was facing him directly, then sat staring at it.

He inhaled and held air in his lungs until it had a calming effect on him. Controlling his breathing implied he was controlling his life. He wasn’t going to call Deirdre again. And probably he’d never see her again. She’d take care of her business in New York then return to her job in Saint Louis.

He tore the note with her phone number into very small pieces and let the pieces flutter into the round metal wastebasket next to his desk.

Then he tried to forget the name of her hotel.

Molly rubbed her knuckles into her eyes, then pushed aside the architectural manuscript and publisher’s style sheet. It was quiet in the apartment except for muted street sounds and the faint noise of another tenant’s TV tuned to one of the frenetic talk shows that dominated daytime viewing hours. “She’s
sleeping
with him, and you don’t
mind?”
a woman’s incredulous voice inquired. Molly smiled and stood up from her desk.

It was almost noon but she wasn’t at all hungry. She walked into the kitchen and poured her third cup of coffee this morning, adding cream and promising herself she’d cut down on caffeine, beginning tomorrow. Idly blowing on the steaming liquid to cool it, she wandered back into the living room, where she’d been working.

“It might not be moral for most people,” said a TV voice from beyond the walls, “but it’s right for us.”

Molly drifted over to the window as she often did to gaze down at the street, at the outside world of selective morality that entered her home by way of a neighbor’s blaring television.

She was about to take a sip of coffee when she noticed the woman in the tan jacket on the sidewalk across the street. The woman still had on the baseball cap and sunglasses so her features would be obscured, especially from Molly’s angle. Her hair was tucked up beneath the cap.

Molly placed the cup on the windowsill and moved to the side, trying to get a better view of the woman so that when she began walking her face might be visible. Right now she was standing squarely facing a
Times
vending machine with her arms crossed, her head slightly bowed, perhaps reading the front page through the murky glass.

Then she straightened, turned her body slightly, and stared directly up at Molly.

She seemed to be smiling as she looked quickly away and strolled out of sight, in the direction of Small Business Preschool.

“What makes you think she was the same woman?” David asked Molly that evening in the apartment. It was raining hard outside, a summer shower that blew intermittently and rattled the loose panes in the windows.

“Same clothes, same size,” Molly said. “Same mirror-lens glasses. Why would she be hanging around the neighborhood?”

David tossed his attaché case full of work onto a chair. “Why did a man in a gorilla suit offer me Monopoly money on my way home tonight? Why does anybody do anything in New York?”

“I don’t know. Why are you defending her?”

“Defending who?”

Molly watched him but said nothing. It was so muggy in the apartment her skin felt oily. An emergency vehicle siren was wailing somewhere in the city, possibly responding to some crisis brought on by the change in the weather.

“You never mentioned before that you think the sunglasses woman is Deirdre,” he said.

“I don’t
think
it. But she seems the most likely candidate, considering she’s just popped into our lives.”

“Who’s popped into our lives? Deirdre, or the woman you saw out the window?”

“Let’s make it Deirdre,” Molly snapped.

“She’s not in our lives,” David said irritably. “She’s in town for a couple of days on business, then she’s going back to Saint Louis.”

“She told you that?”

“More or less. She has a job there, a house or apartment. Friends. Roots.”

“Didn’t she remarry?”

“Yes. But she’s divorced.”

Molly wiped her palm across her damp forehead, noticing that ink from the architectural manuscript had stained the heel of her hand. “So she’s single again,” she said, regretting the words immediately. She knew she was forcing David into a position where he had no choice other than to defend Deirdre if he was going to defend himself. It was unfair, but she seemed unable to stop doing it.

“Mother Theresa’s single, too,” he said. He walked over to her and she let him kiss her, but she decided not to kiss him back. Questions and suspicions swirled unsettled in her mind. “Anyway,” he said, “neither of us is likely ever to see Deirdre again. And if we do, so what?”

Molly studied his face, loving him, wanting so much not to doubt. No indecision showed in his eyes, in the vertical lines etched at the corners of his lips. “You mean that? The ‘so what?’ part?”

“Of course.” He glanced around, using both hands to loosen his tie. “Where’s Michael?”

Molly hadn’t finished her scheduled work when it was time to pick up Michael from Small Business. It had happened before and she’d made arrangements. “He’s still upstairs at Bernice’s. She was watching him while I got some work done.” Bernice was a young woman employed irregularly as an office temp. Molly and David trusted her and often used her as a baby-sitter. Bernice was almost on a level with Julia in Michael’s affections.

“Why don’t you call and see if she’ll keep him another couple of hours?” David asked. “We can go to Ching’s and have a quiet supper.”

Molly didn’t have to think long on the suggestion. She’d been working hard, and she’d finally reached the point where she could stop for the day without guilt. And David had calmed her turmoil of suspicion. He was right. Even if the woman she’d seen was Deirdre, she’d soon have to return to her life far away. Deirdre had a job, connections in another city. If she was jealous of the life David had built since leaving her, she should be pitied. Maybe, Molly thought, in Deirdre’s position, she’d be curious enough to act the same way, to succumb to voyeurism.

“Wait a few minutes while I comb my hair,” she said, forcing a smile, testing his reaction.

He smiled back and the tension seemed to rush from the room.

“A gorilla suit, huh?” Molly said.

The next morning in the park, Molly was halfway through her run, breathing hard but jogging easily, when a woman wearing red shorts and a gray sweatshirt emerged from a group of people walking near the woods and veered onto the trail about a hundred yards ahead of her. She didn’t seem to have been part of the group near the woods; most of them acted surprised by her sudden appearance. The women glanced at each other while the men watched the jogger who’d materialized so suddenly.

Molly momentarily broke stride. She knew immediately who the woman was. Though she was wearing her blue Yankees cap on backward, she still had on the mirror-lens sunglasses, and there was something unmistakable about the way she moved, quickly yet at the same time with an almost lazy, long-limbed insolence. At the same speed as Molly, she was running with seeming lack of effort, her tanned legs measuring out regular strides. She hadn’t looked in Molly’s direction before turning onto the trail, nor did she look behind her now.

Surprise and anger added to Molly’s energy and speed. A sharp ache in her right side threatened to become a debilitating stitch that would sear through her ribs with each breath. And she was off her pace and wouldn’t make the distance if she continued pushing herself so hard.

Then she got mad at herself and decided to end the uncertainty. If the woman was Deirdre and had some sort of psychological problem, or was simply out to antagonize, it was time to confront her. Molly forgot about making the distance to her starting point and lengthened her stride, determined to catch up with the woman.

Anger still bubbled in her at the thought of the woman invading her life and her mind, deliberately appearing before her, wearing the same baseball cap and glasses so Molly would know she was being watched, taunted.

Molly closed to half the distance separating them, and the woman picked up the pace. It was almost imperceptible. Her arms swung in longer arcs, and the white soles of her shoes flashed higher and more vividly. Other than that, there was no change in her motion. Yet the distance between her and Molly began to widen.

Breathing through her nose so she wouldn’t become winded, Molly ran even faster. Still without glancing back, the woman increased her own speed and continued to pull away. Apparently she was fresh, and Molly, who’d already run over three miles, was at a disadvantage. Each breath sent pain burning through her right side, as if a hot wire were probing between her ribs, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to run for much distance.

If only she could get close enough to catch a glimpse of the woman’s face! About two hundred feet separated them now and Molly was still falling back.

She decided to try getting the woman to turn around.

“Hey!” she yelled, but not loud enough. It was difficult to muster a forceful expulsion of air, winded as she was and running fast. She deliberately broke stride, sucking in a long breath then tightening her muscles, tensing to hurl javelins of sound. “Hey! Wait up, you! Turn around, dammit!” Better. Louder.

The woman seemed not to have heard and was running even faster, gaining ground. Soon she was almost out of sight around a curve in the trail, pulling away rapidly, a bright splash of red, her white soles still flashing, her arms swinging.

Then she was beyond the trees and out of sight.

Molly slowed down, kicked angrily at a pebble, then began to walk. Two men jogged past her, chatting casually but breathlessly about the economy, their voices wavering with each stride. A squirrel scurried across the trail ahead of her and scampered in a spiral up a tree to disappear among low branches.

Molly walked slowly, listening to the low, oceanlike roar of traffic outside the park, and the sharper, closer chattering of a jay. The bird sounded frightened and furious, as if it might be protecting its young.

When she neared the starting point of her run, she began jogging again to work off some of her frustration.

Farther along the trail, the woman slowed her pace and fell into an easy jog that was barely faster than a walk. She peeled off the mirror-lens glasses and grinned. Ahead of her, leaning against the trunk of a huge oak tree, Deirdre stood waiting.

Deirdre stood up straight, then began jogging toward her, but she stayed on the grass and at an angle to the trail, in case the winded Molly would begin running again and happen along and see them.

Deirdre kept her eyes fixed on Darlene and smiled, then began to laugh out loud, uncontrollably, as she jogged. The laughter bubbled from her continuously like cold, clear water from a spring. Several people stared at her. A young man and a child stopped and gaped at her peculiar behavior. She didn’t care. They didn’t understand her. Even people who thought they knew her didn’t understand her.

Weren’t
they
usually surprised?

Deirdre slowed down. Darlene met her and walked beside her, breathing hard from her run but by no means exhausted. Even though Darlene had assured her she was up to the task, Deirdre was surprised that such a frail-looking woman could summon so much stamina.

“I did what you said,” Darlene told her, “stayed ahead of her so she couldn’t quite catch up, played with her.”

“You must be in terrific condition,” Deirdre said.

“I am. I dance.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m in ballet. That’s as serious as dance gets. If I had to, I could run another five miles right now.” She crossed her slender arms as she walked and glanced over at Deirdre. “You think it was right, to play a joke like that on Molly?”

“Why not? She’s married to David.”

Darlene stared at her in a funny way, as if taking a fresh look. “That’s hardly a good reason, Deirdre.”

“It’s reason enough for me.” Deirdre lowered her voice to make it clear that there was no room for argument. “I’d like to come see you dance sometime.”

“Sure,” Darlene said. She sounded pleased. “I’ll let you know.”

They were well away from the trail now. Deirdre slowed her pace. Darlene’s breathing was perfectly normal now, and the glisten of perspiration was gone from her long, tanned legs.

A man who’d been feeding pigeons rose from a bench in the shade and wandered off. Deirdre walked toward the unoccupied bench, scattering the pigeons as she approached, and the two women sat down. They were in the shade, out of sight of Molly if she happened to jog past on the trail.

Deirdre remembered when she’d first seen Darlene in New York, sitting on a suitcase in the bus terminal, looking at the rack of magazines in a nearby kiosk. She didn’t look lonely, but she seemed vulnerable. Deirdre had found herself drifting toward the magazine rack, knowing it wasn’t magazines that drew her. But it was Darlene who struck up a conversation, asking Deirdre if she was new to the city. As if Darlene couldn’t tell.

“Molly yelled something at me when I started to pull away from her,” Darlene said, bringing Deirdre back to the present.

“Was it my name?”

“I don’t think so.” Darlene gave her that funny look again. “I thought you two hadn’t met. Why would she think I was you?”

“She saw me once. She knows what I look like, more or less, wearing the cap and sunglasses I asked you to put on.”

“Then that’s why she was trying so hard to catch up with me. You didn’t explain that part of the joke.”

Deirdre watched a pigeon peck persistently at the hard earth, somehow knowing there was something beneath the surface worth getting at. “It wasn’t exactly a joke that we played on Molly.”

“No, I guess not.” Darlene, too, was studying the pigeon. “I think what we did to her was cruel, Deirdre.”

“You agreed to it.”

“But I didn’t know then why you wanted to taunt her. Just because she’s married to David, that’s no way for you to behave. No way for you to win David back.”

“David will never know about it.”

“Yes he will. Molly will tell him.”

“He won’t believe her. I can make sure of that.”

“Is that your plan?” Darlene asked. “To drive a wedge between them?”

“I hadn’t thought about it, but that wouldn’t be a bad plan.”

“I disagree,” Darlene said. “Why don’t you face up to the fact that your relationship with David is over and get on with your life?”

“That phrase about people getting on with their lives is the worst kind of psychobabble,” Deirdre said. “Unless we decide to commit suicide, none of us has any choice other than to get on with our life.”

“It’s
how
we get on with life that’s important, Deirdre. We can accept fate and be content, or we can fight it and be miserable.”

“It isn’t that simple!”

Darlene looked around, embarrassed.
“Shh.
You’re raising your voice.”

“You’re the one talking too loud,” Deirdre said. “People are staring.”

“They’re staring at you, not me.” Darlene stood up from the bench. “I’m going now.”

Deirdre suddenly felt guilty, unworthy. Darlene was one of those people who could do that to her. It was something she hadn’t counted on. “I suppose you’re mad at me now.”

Darlene looked down at her, smiled, and shook her head. “No, it isn’t that. If I don’t leave, I’ll be late for dance class.”

“You’re always dashing away somewhere so you won’t be late.”

“I lead a busy life.”

“Busier than mine.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Deirdre. You’ll meet people, have fun. You’ll see.”

“I’m not even sure that’s what I want.”

“What
do
you want?” Darlene suddenly raised a forefinger to her lips. “No! Never mind, don’t tell me. There’s no time.” She began walking backward, grinning at Deirdre. “We’ll get together soon.”

“When?”

Without answering, Darlene lifted her arm in a wave, then spun gracefully to face the direction she was going.

Deirdre sat and watched her walk away. After about fifty feet, Darlene began to jog. She ran with beautiful long strides and perfect balance, her head held high and not bouncing at all. All that ballet, Deirdre thought, as Darlene passed from sight.

Deirdre continued staring after her. There was something about Darlene she didn’t like, she decided.

And she knew what it was.

Darlene was beginning to treat her the way other people often did. As if there might be something wrong with her.

Didn’t she know that could be dangerous?