The Ex

17

Deirdre had eaten supper at a deli near the movie theater. Now she sat alone in the dark, watching Esther Williams do underwater calisthenics. At least that’s what they looked like to Deirdre. She thought she could do what Williams was doing, and look better doing it. She might even be a better swimmer.

Well, no, she had to admit. Maybe not a better swimmer. But Williams was a strong-looking woman like Deirdre, an athlete with curves. And probably, if you took swimming out of the mix, not as good an athlete as Deirdre. Maybe even if you left swimming in. Deirdre was sure she could have beaten a young Esther Williams at the decathlon. Or in a martial arts tournament. She smiled at the idea.

Deirdre loved to sit alone at the movies, secure in the darkness, lost in the world on the screen. She had always been fond of dark, safe places: movie theaters, closets, basements. But at the movies was the best place of all to be, with not only security, but a world that was as real as her own, brilliant and actual before her, claiming her eyes and her mind.

Everything in Williams’s world was so perfect, so beautiful. Problems and people moved in and out of her celluloid life, but always things worked out for her no matter how menacing her antagonists or how gloomy the outlook. The screenplay took care of her like benign fate.

The music swelled. The screen was now filled with dozens of beautiful women in one-piece bathing suits diving through flaming hoops into the spacious pool. The camera followed some of them underwater, where they smiled as they kept their form, legs tight together and toes pointed, and rose toward the surface like graceful mermaids.

Deirdre preferred old movies. They drew you into their world and held you there. The new movies came out of the screen at you, tried to startle you with abrupt, jarring images like on MTV and with sudden loud noises. Sometimes they posed questions without answering them, and she would leave the theater perplexed rather than reassured. But tonight, she knew as she watched the aquatics and troubled love affairs, that by the end of the last reel everything would be resolved. As it might at least possibly be in her own life. If it happened to Esther Williams, why not to Deirdre?

She sat transfixed by the movie until the final credits had run and the house lights came on to reveal the dinginess of the theater and the flawed humanity of the patrons rising from their seats or filing up the aisles toward the lobby and exits. A very thin man who looked unhealthy, with a yellow-white beard, glanced over at Deirdre as he passed in the aisle. He grinned toothlessly and winked. She gave him an angry look and he walked on. He was nothing like any of the men who had courted Williams.

When almost everyone had filed from the auditorium, she rose from her seat and walked up the aisle.

The lobby was like an air lock between the predictable and perfect parallel world of the screen, and the tawdry and sometimes surprising world outside the glass doors. Deirdre stood and watched people stream past outside. Some of them were well dressed, obviously tourists or Broadway theatergoers. Others were shabby and had a furtive air about them and walked hurriedly, as if something might be pursuing them. Three teenage boys jumped and bounced past, yelling at each other and grinning. An old woman laden with shopping bags waved a cab over and climbed into the back, glaring after the boys as if they’d been the final straw that had made her hail a taxi rather than walk the rowdy, unsafe streets. A slim woman with graceful, slender legs, wearing high heels and a light blue raincoat, strode past.

Darlene!

Deirdre ran to the nearest glass door, opened it, and stepped out to the middle of the sidewalk. Someone bumped into her and didn’t apologize, but she hardly noticed. She was staring at the woman in the blue raincoat, who was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street.

“Darlene!” she called. But apparently the woman didn’t hear her.

Deirdre began walking toward her, preparing to call Darlene’s name again when she was closer.

Then the woman turned around and hurried to the other side of the cross street to take advantage of the still unchanged traffic signal. Deirdre saw her face for a few seconds and realized with disappointment that she wasn’t Darlene. Her eyes had been fooled by some other woman who from a distance, and at a glance from a certain angle, resembled a youthful Audrey Hepburn. Only this woman wasn’t so young. Maybe even in her mid-fifties.

Suddenly Deirdre was acutely, piercingly lonely. She knew now that she’d felt that way since the end of the movie. That had to be why she’d so wanted the woman to be Darlene.

She decided to go for a walk, to be among the crowds of people in Times Square. She’d heard that lonely people could be even lonelier in a crowd, but she knew that it wasn’t always true. So much of conventional wisdom was wrong. Tonight, she’d feel better surrounded by fellow human beings.

Before setting out, she decided to call her hotel and see if there were any messages. If everything had gone smoothly, like in the movies, the real estate agency would have called to give her the final go-ahead. The agent had said that there should be no problem because the apartment was vacant and had been for almost a month. But you never knew.

Back in the lobby, she asked an usher for directions to a public phone, and he told her there was one near the rest rooms but for movie patrons only. He remembered her, though, and gave her permission to use the phone. Kindness from a stranger. A hopeful sign.

The hotel switchboard operator had her hold the line for a minute, then returned and said yes, there was a message for her.

Deirdre smiled as she listened to the message read over the phone.

She hung up and smiled at the usher as she was leaving the lobby for the second time. Developments had shaped this world so that for now it was like the world of the movie screen. The dynamics were the same, as Deirdre’s present and near-future were concisely and benignly scripted by fate. The times when such convergences occurred were rare, and she appreciated and savored them.

The apartment was hers. Of course there was the problem of money, but Deirdre was sure that one could be resolved. It was in the stars for her, just as it would have been in the world on screen.

On the teeming pavement, she walked fast. People got out of her way.