John Lutz - The Ex

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 attache 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?”