Seven Women: An Erotic Private Investigation

Chapter 1…

I’ve been sitting at the counter of this bar for almost an hour, now on my third drink, when I notice one of the women, in a group of women, saunter in and sit in a booth. There are five of them, all in their mid-twenties to early thirties. I don’t want to seem too conspicuous. I try to verify my suspicion from the mirror at the bar. There are too many bottles in the way. I turn around and look. Yes, it’s her — my ex-wife. She sees me looking, no expression on her face, quickly goes back to her four friends — smiling and laughing, as if I don’t exist.

The best thing to do — get up and leave, go home or to another bar. I thought this would be an uncomplicated day — come in and have a few drinks, go home and maybe watch some television. Now she enters the narrative, much in the same way she originally came in: without preamble.

I haven’t seen my ex-wife in five months. She wears a gray blazer, white blouse, dark skirt. She’s just off work, I assume; she’s an associate editor at a mass-market paperback publisher. Her friends don’t look as if they’re in publishing; they don’t have that fatigued demeanor many of her colleagues have. I wonder who they are.

I get another drink. I hear them laughing and talking, and I feel small. I can see her face in the mirror now: long black hair, fair skin. I remember things. I hate it when you drink and remember. Drinking alone isn’t a good thing sometimes. These women have the right idea: come in as a group. You get less melancholy. I don’t have any drinking buddies.

I get up and go to the bathroom. I feel her looking at me, although she’d never admit it. One of her friends, a blonde, glances my way; she whispers something to the woman next to her. Short dark hair. I don’t believe I know any of them. I never knew her friends that well. We had an isolated-from-the-world kind of marriage — eight months in all.

In the men’s room, I decide I’m going to do it. What the hell. It would be uncivilized, after all, not to say hello.

I go to the bar first, freshen my drink, and make my way over to the booth and the five women. My ex-wife is at one end, the blonde who looked at me at the other. My ex-wife sees me coming and flips the hair out of her eyes, trying to ignore me. The other women look my way; one giggles. They’re expectant. Maybe they think I have a line, that I want to come on to them all. How the hell do I know what women think?

“Hello, Tasha.”

My ex-wife looks up. “Hi.”

“Tasha,” one of the women — a redhead — says, “Is this someone we should know about?”

“This is Leonard, my ex-husband,” she tells them.

“Oh,” one of them says, “the mysterious ex-hubby.”

I feel sweaty all of the sudden.

“Hello,” they say to me.

“Hello,” I say back.

“Hey,” says the blonde, “why don’t you join us?”

Tasha starts to say something, but two others say, “Hey, that’d be fun. We should have a guy here, get his impressions.”

“I’m sure Leonard has things to do,” my ex-wife says.

“I was just sitting over there drinking,” I say. “Just wanted to say — hello.”

“We’re drinking, too,” the blonde says. “That’s what you do in a bar. Drink and talk and bullshit. Why don’t you join us? There’s plenty of room, and I don’t think Tasha would really mind — would you, Tasha?”

My ex-wife brushes the hair from her eyes again, glares at me as the hair falls back. “No, I wouldn’t mind. What the hell.”

Yeah, what the hell. Our favorite phrase from a failed union. Tasha moves into the booth, next to the redhead. The blonde nods. I sit next to my ex-wife and feel fucked. She’s trying to prove something to them, to me, maybe to herself, I don’t know. That she can keep calm and cool in my presence? That the marriage is behind her now? Or does she want to show her friends what an asshole I was, a memento mori of her past?

I’m a little drunk and a little lonely and I don’t care, so I sit next to my ex-wife and look at these women and wait for anything.