The Ex

9

Silver’s Gym in midtown Manhattan was crowded that evening. All of the Nautilus equipment was in use, and four exhausted-looking women were riding the stationary bicycles side by side. Two men were waiting for David to finish his bench presses with the free weights so they could use them. Herb Mindle, a psychiatrist whose office was nearby, was spotting for David, as David, on his back on the padded bench, struggled to raise the heavy barbell for the fourth time and set it in its supports. He was doing three sets of four with the weights near his maximum capacity, trying to build bulk.

“You’re there!” Mindle said, staying back but ready to jump in and support the weight if David’s strength failed.

David let out a long whoosh! of air as he let the barbell drop into the cradle of the bench’s vertical supports.

“Want to use this thing?” he asked as he sat up and wiped his face with a towel.

“No thanks,” Mindle said. “I’ll spot for these guys.”

David got up and walked toward the locker room, noticing that the clock over the door read seven-fifteen. Molly was expecting him at eight.

He showered, dressed, packed his workout clothes in his small blue nylon duffle bag, then left the gym. Mindle, just standing up from having done his sets of bench presses, waved to him as he went out the door. The women on the stationary bicycles were still at it.

He was three blocks away from the gym, walking along the crowded sidewalk toward his subway stop, when he heard Deirdre’s voice.

“David! Again! My God, I don’t believe it!”

He couldn’t hold down his pleasure at seeing her, but he knew this seemingly chance meeting had to have been planned. “Listen, Deirdre, this is more than coinci-”

He stopped talking as he noticed the man who was obviously with Deirdre. He was tall, balding, a businessman of some sort, apparently, with his muted checked gray suit and conservative tie. He was slender through the chest and shoulders but had put on weight around the middle so that his stomach bulged noticeably over his belt beneath his unbuttoned suit coat. His face was bland and amiable, and he wore thick glasses without frames that made his eyes look immense and strangely innocent.

“David!” Deirdre almost squealed with pleasure. “I was sure we’d never meet again!”

Before he could move, she’d leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek. Her red hair looked particularly wild and attractive in the summer breeze, and she was wearing a simple but low-cut beige linen dress and matching pumps. When she moved in close to kiss him, a disturbing and not unpleasant scent of perfume and perspiration came to him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Subway station, then home.” He’d sounded curt, surlier than he’d intended. The man glanced at him.

“Oh!” Deirdre said, stepping back. “This is my very good friend Craig Chumley. Craig, meet David Jones, my ex.”

Chumley looked surprised. “As in ex-husband?”

“Uh-huh! He sure is.” She seemed oddly proud of David. She squeezed Chumley’s arm. “Well, what’d you think, my ex would be old and bald as a cucumber?”

Chumley laughed, a bit ill at ease, perhaps because he was one of those men who tried to disguise baldness with long strands of hair plastered sideways across their heads, like loosely thatched lids at the mercy of the wind. He had yellowed teeth and oversized bicuspids that gave him a faintly canine look when he laughed.

“Craig and I were on our way to dinner,” she said. “He promised to show me the Rainbow Room. Ever been to the famous Rainbow Room, David?”

“No.”

“You really oughta take Molly there sometime. Hey, why not tonight? You want to join us? Four’s company.”

David smiled. He was feeling better every second. Maybe it was Chumley’s presence, but today Deirdre seemed not at all threatening to his libido.

“Four’s more likely to be a crowd,” he said, looking at Chumley, who was rocking back and forth on the heels of his huge wingtip shoes, like a man testing the precariousness of his situation.

“Well, maybe some other time. Maybe I’ll call you.” Deirdre lowered her voice, as if trading a confidence. “You know, David, I wrote a note and a phone number where I could be reached in New York and slipped it in your jacket pocket when we met the other day. Did you find it?”

“No,” he lied, “I hardly ever use my suit coat pockets.”

“I knew at the deli you’d refuse to call if I suggested it, so I thought I’d let you think on it. I hoped you’d make the first call and we could talk. The past isn’t so threatening that we need to be afraid of it, David. We definitely should be friends.”

“The past doesn’t seem so terrible or threatening to me,” he said.

“Why, David!” she said with a dazzling smile, pretending, or perhaps actually believing, he’d complimented her.

Chumley glanced at his wristwatch, caught David looking at him, and shrugged as if in apology for being ill-mannered.

“We have reservations,” he explained, a helpless victim of time.

“So have I,” David said, looking directly at Deirdre.

“We’d better get on to the restaurant,” Deirdre said, “or they’ll give our table to some celebrity.” She took Chumley’s long arm. “You call me, David, hear? Friendship is olden and golden and shouldn’t be tossed on the trash mound.”

He didn’t answer.

“Nice meeting you, Dave,” Chumley said, and held out a long, pale hand toward David.

David shook hands with him. “Enjoy the Rainbow Room.”

“Oh, we will!” Deirdre said.

She surprised David by kissing Chumley full on the mouth. Seemed to surprise Chumley, too.

They were holding hands as they walked away toward East Fifty-fourth Street.

David watched them until they’d disappeared in the throng of heat-weary people who had dropped in elevators from one plane of their lives to another and, like him, were wending their way from work to home. Chumley was definitely a welcome addition to the Deirdre equation. Whatever temptation she might be to David, whatever wiles she might have worked, any involvement was less likely now. David felt safe from her. From himself.

Twenty minutes later he was on the subway, roaring through darkness toward Molly and Michael.

Molly was sitting quietly in the apartment living room, the back of her head resting against the sofa’s thick upholstery. The room was eclectically and comfortably furnished: overstuffed sofa, well-stocked bookcases, framed museum prints on the walls. A console TV with a VCR on top sat against the wall opposite the sofa. Near the double-window was Molly’s desk with a green-shaded banker’s lamp, reference books, a ceramic coffee mug stuffed with pencils next to the architectural manuscript.

Her body jerked against the soft back and arm of the sofa as a key grated in the lock. Her mind had wandered; she’d been thinking about this morning, the woman in the park.

She set aside the New York Times she’d been reading when she’d lost concentration. The door opened and David came in. He dropped his blue duffle bag on the chair where he usually tossed his attache case.

“Hi, Mol.” He walked around behind her, leaned over the sofa, and kissed the top of her head, her hair. She stood up as he went to the closet by the door and hung his suit coat on a hanger. He removed his tie, the paisley one she’d given him last Christmas, and draped it over the back of the chair.

Molly had parted her lips to tell him about the woman in the park when he said, “I ran into Deirdre again. There was a man with her.”

She listened as he described his meeting with Deirdre and Craig Chumley.

“She’d left a note with her phone number in my coat pocket,” he said. “I told her I hadn’t found it, but I had. I didn’t bother calling her.”

“Apparently she wasn’t offended,” Molly said.

“More disappointed, it seemed. I do think she simply wants to exorcise some old demons, to be friends. Enough time’s passed that it’s possible, I suppose.”

“Who’s this Chumley?” Molly asked.

David shrugged. “Just a guy she met through her job, is the impression I got.” He walked into the kitchen. She heard water run in the sink. Silence. He returned to the living room holding a glass of water. His upper lip was wet and glistening. “They were on their way to the Rainbow Room for dinner. She invited us to join them.”

“Both of us?”

“That’s what she said. I doubt if Chumley was keen on it, though. He seemed relieved when I declined.” He walked over and kissed her lightly on the lips, looked down at her with an adoration so obvious that she feared it was feigned. “Listen, Mol. I think both of us have reacted a little extremely to Deirdre popping up here in New York.”

“Maybe,” Molly said, wondering where this was going.

“She’s not going to be in town that long,” David said, “and she’s tied to her job back in Saint Louis. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if she and this Chumley want to have dinner with us, maybe we should accept.”

“I’m not so sure, David…”

“I know how you feel, honey, and I don’t blame you. She’s my former wife and you don’t want her in the same orbit, even the same solar system, that our family’s in.”

“Try galaxy.”

“I feel the same way, and she really isn’t in the same galaxy, except she’s just a visitor-like in Star Trek. Couple of days and she’ll be beamed back to Saint Louis via TWA.”

Molly didn’t know quite what to make of what he’d just told her. Another chance meeting on the street, and this time Deirdre had a man in tow.

“I want to make sure we understand each other about Deirdre,” she said.

“And I want you to understand she doesn’t seem to harbor any sort of malice toward you or me.”

“Why is she so intent on seeing you?”

“She’s curious about me. About us.” He took another sip of water then swirled the liquid around in the glass for a moment, staring down at it. “Mol, after the divorce she met someone, got pregnant.” Half a lie, he thought. What difference did it make who had fathered the dead fetus? “He…well, he physically abused her and injured the baby. It had to be aborted. The incident still haunts her.”

“God, that’s terrible.”

“I think all she wants is to have a quiet dinner with us and Chumley, talk for a while, and lay the past to rest. Can you understand that?”

“I should be able to, I suppose.”

“Neither of us has anything to fear.”

“Neither of us?”

“That’s right. She and Chumley are in at least the early stages of a hot romantic relationship. They’re into French kissing in public.”

“How reassuring.”

David grinned. “Poor Chumley. Deirdre can be very moody. There’s no way for him to know what he’s getting into. Anyway, if they ask us to dinner again, how about it?”

“Is this some kind of test?” She waited for his reply.

Instead of answering, he said, “Have I mentioned Deirdre’s hair is red now? I guess she wants to jazz herself up, make herself look younger, but to tell you the truth she’s still kind of worn-down and ordinary.”

Twisting the truth to protect her; what had she to fear from this older woman? Molly couldn’t help smiling. She went to him. “David, David…” She kissed him then backed away a step and stared at him. “Okay,” she said, “if they invite us again, we’ll go. But I’m not sharing any dip with her.”

Molly watched him tilt back his head and finish his glass of water. She realized she’d been holding her breath, as if she’d been the one drinking. She moved closer to him and pressed her head into his shoulder. He hugged her, and she felt his hand gently patting her back. There was no reason to tell him about the woman in the park now, no point in pushing him on the subject. He might consider her paranoid about Deirdre, and he might be right. New York was undeniably well stocked with leggy women who jogged and wore baseball caps and sunglasses.

“Michael at Bernice’s again?” David asked.

She nodded, prodding his chest with her forehead.

“Let’s get him,” he said, “then the three of us can go out and have some supper. Sound okay?”

“Sounds fine.” She remembered the last time he’d suggested dinner under similar circumstances. It had been for just the two of them. She liked it better this way.

“Any preferences?” he asked.

“Anywhere but the Rainbow Room.”

They settled on hot dogs from the vendor down the street.

David had been so reasonable she knew she’d been unreasonable. He could do that to her; it was one of the few infuriating things about him.

But he was right, she knew. She’d become unsettled about a woman she’d never met, who might indeed have nothing to do with the jogger Molly had seen in the park. Probably had nothing to do with her.

Not that it mattered, since Deirdre would soon be leaving New York to return to her home.

The only thing remotely bothering Molly now was a persistent feeling that she’d shied away from a fear she should have faced. And maybe she should have had more faith in David.

More faith in herself and the two of them together.