The Ex

that seemed always ready to bite, her upper lip sliding sensuously like the sheath of daggers over perfect, large white teeth when she smiled. He found himself staring at her lips and quickly returned his gaze to her eyes. A stranger’s eyes, a lover’s eyes.

“It’s been…what, five years?” he asked, still stunned.

“Closer to six,” she said. “You never did have a good sense of time.” She stepped back, gazing at him with obvious pleasure and disbelief. “This is amazing, running into you here! In a city the size of New York!”

David couldn’t quite regain his mental equilibrium; he didn’t want to believe this was happening. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hey, David!” she said. “You don’t seem glad to see me. We were a married couple once, remember? We can at least talk to one another. Don’t be afraid. You know me. I never did bite.” She smiled. “That is, unless you asked me to.”

A bearded man in a gray business suit, standing ahead of David in line, had apparently been eavesdropping and turned to stare. Deirdre ignored him, holding her smile.

David forced a return smile. “It’s not that I’m afraid, Deirdre. I’m just…well, surprised.” He tried to summon cheer that wouldn’t seem forced. “How long are you going to be in town?”

“Only about a week. I’m an interior designer for a shoe company in Saint Louis, laying out their stores for maximum efficiency and eye appeal.”

This wasn’t the Deirdre he remembered. He was amazed and must have shown it.

“Don’t look so astounded, David,” she said with a grin. “I went back to school after our divorce. There are things we don’t know about each other. After all, six years is a lot of water through the dam.”

“‘Over’ the dam, you mean.” Oops! He recalled how she habitually mangled maxims and distorted platitudes. His corrections used to infuriate her. Maybe they still would.

She laughed. “Oh, David. You’re still correcting me. I still say things like that a little bit wrong, get them tangled up. It’s just like we were still married.”

The bearded man turned around again. This time Deirdre glared at him and he turned away.

David was embarrassed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I had no business-”

“It doesn’t matter now,” she interrupted with a shrug. “I know I used to drive you crazy with my little flaws.”

“Well, I wasn’t perfect myself.”

“Almost, though.” She blatantly looked him up and down. “You look good, David. Bigger than I remember. You’re lifting weights, right?”

He felt a rush of pleasure at the compliment. “Now and then. How’s your husband?” he asked quickly, to assuage his guilt over what was skirting the edges of his mind. “What’s his name? Sam?”

“Stan,” she said. “Stan Grocci. He’s a building contractor. Puts up houses but does some commercial work, too.”

“Any children?”

“I’m afraid not.” She paused, looked down, then back up into his eyes. “David, Stan and I are divorced.”

He was unsettled by the knowledge and didn’t know how he should react. What do you say when you find out your ex-wife is divorced again? “I’m, uh, sorry.” He was staring at her mouth.

“Me, too. Stan’s a great guy, really and truly, but his business was his life. Is his life, I mean. He’s alive and healthy and doing well. I don’t want to make it sound as if he’s standing with one foot by the grave.”

“‘In’ the-No, sorry, never mind. It’s my job making me do it, I guess. Bad habit, editing people when they talk.”

The line at the cashier’s booth had edged forward. The bearded man in front of David paid the Oriental woman at the register and walked away carrying his lunch in its foam container.

David balanced his own foam plate of salad and his soda can and reached for his wallet. Before he could draw it from his pocket, Deirdre had stepped forward and handed the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. “For both of us,” she said.

“No, Deirdre,” David said, “really, let me-”

“Lunch is on me, David,” she cut him off. “For other times’ sake. I’m an independent woman now.” She accepted her change from the cashier then stood up on her toes and peered across the deli. “Oh, there’s an open booth. Come on, let’s strike before the iron is hot.”

She strode away, elbowing her way through the people still loading their foam plates at the long serving bar.

David hesitated, then followed.

They sat down across from each other in one of the wooden booths that lined the long, paneled walls, their lunches on the table before them. There were framed sports photographs on the walls. The one near their booth was an old black-and-white of Joe DiMaggio swinging mightily at a waist-high pitch, the muscles in his arms corded, his eyes trained calmly and intently on the blurred point of impact where bat met ball.

Deirdre didn’t begin to eat, but instead stared as intently at David as DiMaggio stared at the baseball. David was getting uneasy.

Then she looked away from him and began using a white plastic knife to spread mustard on her sandwich.

“So,” she said, “you’re an editor.”

“Not exactly,” David said. “I supervise fee readers at a literary agency. People send in manuscripts, and we’re paid to read them then write and tell the authors why their work isn’t salable.”

Deirdre opened her mouth wide and attacked her sandwich in a way that was almost primal. “But you do sell them sometimes,” she said as she chewed.

For a crazy moment he wondered if she fancied herself a writer and had a manuscript she wanted him to give special attention. Maybe that was what this was about; such things happened in his line of work. “Sometimes,” he said, “but not very often.”

“Is it a big agency?”

“One of the biggest.”

She swallowed her bite of sandwich and licked her lips. “Well, I am impressed. All your reading in bed has paid off, and now you’re a big executive. I always knew you had brains, David.”

“You never mentioned it at the time.”

She reached across the table and touched the back of his hand with just the tips of her red-enameled nails. The touch felt like a brand. “No,” she admitted, “but I wish now that I had. I wish things had been different for us.”

David felt a lump form in his throat. He had to swallow, so he took a sip of his soda to conceal his emotion. “I never did understand why you left me, Deirdre.”

She shook her head slowly, as if in admonition. “That girl, David. She was barely out of her teens.”

Marci, she was talking about. A twenty-two-year-old law student at Saint Louis University who’d lived in the same apartment building. David had always regarded their affair as more a result than a cause of his problems with Deirdre.

“We were all younger then,” he said. “And I was serious when I told you she didn’t mean anything to me. She came on to me one day like she was crazy. It was something that happened and was meaningless, then it was over within a month.” He stared at his food. “I thought…Well, I thought you might have left me because I insisted on the abortion.” They hadn’t planned on having a child, had little money, and their marriage was clearly deteriorating at the time Deirdre told him she was pregnant. Abortion had seemed the only logical path to David then. He still wasn’t sure if he’d been right.

“I didn’t want the abortion,” Deirdre said.

David smiled sadly. “So you told me. Then, after you left me, you didn’t have to abort the pregnancy, but you chose to anyway.” He had always wondered why.

Maybe she still wasn’t going to tell him. “Our marriage was about sex, wasn’t it? Honestly now, David.”

“Not only about sex,” he said.

“But mostly. You remember how we were. Rough with each other.”

He did remember. They’d both been in some kind of dark sexual thrall, experimenting, trying anything,