John Lutz - The Ex

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.