by John Lutz
David hadn’t spoken at all during the drive to the cemetery and was standing motionless, as if lost in his own thoughts. Maybe Bernice’s death had affected him more than Molly had thought. Men were that way, keeping their feelings bottled and corked and then breaking down in private, as if grief and loneliness had to be synonymous. He’d missed the first part of the service in the mortuary chapel, and when he’d returned to sit beside her again in the pew, his face was pale and thoughtful.
The minister tossed a handful of earth onto the artificial turf, then nodded to the mourners as a signal that the funeral was over. With a sad smile, he moved toward Bernice’s mother to give final consolation.
David started to leave, but Molly gripped his arm and stopped him. He seemed startled for a second, which surprised her. Then he smiled down at her and looked all around him, as if coming out of a dream.
When the minister had walked away, she went to where Bernice’s mother was still standing with the slim, dark man.
“If you need any help,” Molly said to her. “I mean, with Bernice’s things. We live right downstairs from her apartment and we’ll be glad to do what we can.”
“That’s nice of you,” the mother-Iris, Molly remembered now-said. She might have had a slight accent, though Molly hadn’t noticed it the night before. Molly wrote their phone number on a slip of paper from her purse and gave it to her.
“She was on her swim team in high school,” Iris said. “Did you know that?”
“No,” Molly heard David say. He had joined them and now seemed himself again, free of his thoughts of death.
“We could have had an autopsy, but I couldn’t bear to think of that being done to her. She’s dead. She’ll stay dead forever, no matter why she died.”
“I understand,” Molly said. “I think you made the right decision.”
“In the water,” Iris Clark said, “she was a natural. Like a beautiful and graceful dolphin.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said again, not knowing what else to say. The lean man might have been looking at her. She could see only her own twin reflections in his glasses.
He took Iris Clark’s arm, nodded to both Molly and David, then turned and led Iris to one of the waiting black limousines.
Molly felt David’s arm encircle her waist as they walked toward the last of the three limos.
“On her high school swim team,” Molly said.
“Freak things happen,” David said glumly.
Forever.
Molly began to cry.
24
After Deirdre described what had happened at the funeral home, Darlene looked horrified.
“That was a terrible thing to do!”
“Why?” Deirdre asked. “Just because angelic little you wouldn’t do it?”
They were walking along crowded Fifth Avenue. Darlene was wearing tight slacks that showed off her slender, shapely dancer’s legs, and a white pullover with a scoop neck that made her own neck look even thinner and more delicate. She and Deirdre had met in front of the public library, near a stone lion that guarded so much knowledge. Deirdre’s high heels were making regular clacking sounds on the concrete as she strode along the sidewalk. Beside her, Darlene walked quietly in soft soles.
“I certainly wouldn’t do it in a mortuary,” Darlene said. “And don’t tell me about all the Freudian relationships between sex and death. That’s no excuse.”
“I don’t need an excuse. Anyway, Freud was a fool.”
People glanced at them as the two women approached, then the crowds on the sidewalk parted to let them pass. Darlene had such a confident stride that folks automatically made way for her, sometimes even stepping wide to get out of her path. Deirdre was jealous. She couldn’t help but notice the deferential way people always treated Darlene, as if she were some kind of royalty.
“Why did you have sex there?” Darlene asked.
“Because I wanted to, and so did David.”
“You made him want to. I’ve been thinking a lot about your situation, Deirdre. What you wanted, what you still want, is to control David entirely. To possess him sexually and in every other way.”
“I never made a secret of that. Not with you, anyway. Propriety is the spice of life.”
“Don’t spring those cutesy puns and malapropisms on me, Deirdre.”
Deirdre didn’t like being talked to in such a manner, but an apology here might be the wisest choice. “Okay, I’m sorry. It’s an old habit.”
“I don’t like it. And I don’t approve of sex with a married man in a funeral home. It’s inexcusable.”
“But we both enjoyed the risk. This might be impossible for you to understand, but for some people sex is best when it’s dangerous. It’s much more of a thrill.”
“Does that explain why all those poor people died of AIDS?”
“It explains some of it, I bet. I didn’t realize you had such a social conscience.”
Darlene stopped walking. Deirdre continued for a few steps. then stopped and turned. They moved into a doorway so they wouldn’t be knocked down by the relentless mass of pedestrians.
“I care about you, Deirdre,” Darlene said. “I don’t want you taking those kinds of risks, sinning that way. I care about your body and your immortal soul.”
Deirdre was astounded. “Are you some kind of religious freak?”
“No.”
“Then don’t be so judgmental.”
Darlene looked down at the cigarette butts and crumpled gum and candy wrappers littering the pavement. Then she looked up at Deirdre. “Okay,” she said seriously, “maybe you’re right. From now on I’ll try not to judge.”
Deirdre felt better. She reached out for Darlene, but Darlene moved away. Almost as if she were afraid.
“You’re not scared of me because I like wild sex, are you?” Deirdre asked.
“Of course not. And who says I don’t like wild sex?”
Deirdre laughed. “I can’t imagine you…actually doing it.”
“Well,” Darlene said, “I actually do. I have male friends.”
Deirdre glanced across the street at a corner coffee shop. “Let’s go over there and have something to drink.”
“I can’t and you shouldn’t,” Darlene said. “You’ve missed enough work today. Your boss might object.”
“Not Chumley. I’ve got him trapped around my finger.”
“Deirdre!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“You’re so manipulative.”
“Aren’t you being judge-”
“Yes, I am. My turn to apologize. But you really should get to work.”
“Chumley truly won’t care if I’m another hour late. Because I took time off today, I plan on working very late tonight. It’s already arranged.”
“Be that as it may,” Darlene said earnestly, sounding old-fashioned the way she did sometimes, “I can’t go across the street and have a drink with you. It’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“It just is.” Deirdre thought she was going to glance at her watch again, but she didn’t. Instead she moved out of the doorway, into the throng of passing pedestrians. “Sorry, Deirdre.”
“Wait a-”
“Bye! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
And she was gone.
Maybe you’re sorry, and maybe you’re not, Deirdre thought.
She was hurt and disappointed. She had wanted to talk with Darlene, to find out exactly what she thought that Freud had said about sex and death. She wanted to set Darlene straight about Freud.
Then she glanced at her watch, the way Darlene so often did, and began striding briskly to work.
Sex and death indeed!
25
“You’re killing me!” Chumley moaned.
Behind him nighttime Manhattan glittered outside his office window. It was a large office with gray file cabinets along one wall. On another wall was a sales chart, a bulletin board plastered with memos and shipping schedules, a Minolta copy machine o
n a table with folding legs. Cardboard storage boxes were stacked in a corner. It was an office not for show, but where work was done.
Two gray steel desks, one larger than the other, matched the filing cabinets. On the large desk sat a black multilined phone, file folders, a wire Out basket, a fancy gold and black marble pen set, and framed photos of a smiling, middle-aged woman and two preteen girls wearing smaller but brighter versions of the same smile.
Chumley was seated in his desk chair rolled out from behind the larger desk. Deirdre, her skirt hiked to her waist, was straddling him, moving her hips with increasing speed and force. With each pump of her hips the chair squealed as if in pain. Sometimes it was Chumley who groaned, not in pain. After hours had never been so good for Chumley.
He had his head thrown back now and was moaning softly. Deirdre knew the moment. She grinned down at him, cupped his face in her hands, and kissed him violently on the lips. His body arched and trembled beneath her and she rode him as he reached orgasm.
“Jesus!” Chumley moaned, and his body relaxed. Went completely limp.
Deirdre lifted herself up from him just enough to work her hand down between their bodies. She kissed him again, hunching her shoulders, then used her hand to bring herself to climax. She’d been close, and it took her less than a minute.
Her breathing was only slightly hard and not at all ragged, but Chumley’s chest was still heaving as he sucked in oxygen. Laughing deep in her throat, she leaned forward and probed his ear with her tongue. He turned his head away.
“I’ve had it, Deirdre,” he gasped. “Whew!..Sorry.”
She planted her feet on the floor and rose up off him, letting her skirt fall back into place then smoothing it down over her thighs. She leaned back with her hips against the edge of the desk. Chumley, fully dressed but with his pants and boxer shorts down around his ankles, remained sprawled in the chair, slowly winning the struggle to regain his breath.
“You are something,” he said between gasps.
She smiled at him, then picked up her panties from the floor and stuffed them in a pocket of her skirt. She was looking out the window behind them. The blinds were raised high and the drapes opened wide. Hundreds if not thousands of lighted windows faced them. And some that were not lighted. Those were the ones that interested her, people staring out at the world from darkness.
Chumley was breathing more evenly. The desk chair, tilted as far back as it would go, gave a final eeeek! as he dropped forward in it.
“We should do this at your place,” he said. “In a bed. We keep this up and you’re gonna kill me.”
“It’s possible.”
“Your place next time?”
She yanked her belt around so it was aligned with her skirt. “I kind of like this, with the window behind us and everybody in New York with a telescope watching.”
Chumley laughed. “You’re an exhibitionist.”
“Only sometimes.”
Chumley bent low, then pulled up his shorts and pants as he managed to climb out of the chair. It was an awkward maneuver. He rebuttoned his shirt, fastened his belt, and straightened his clothes. Then he stooped and picked up his tie from the floor. Also on the floor were a goose-necked desk lamp, a jumble of file folders and papers, and various other items brushed from the desk during their sometimes violent lovemaking. Chumley picked up the In basket, which had been lying near his tie, and set it on the desk next to the Out.
He looked around and shook his head. “We made a hell of a mess here.”
“Worth it?” Deirdre asked.
“Worth it.”
She picked up an ashtray and laid it on the desk. “Don’t worry about the mess. You go ahead home and I’ll straighten things up and put everything back where it belongs. There’s a place for everything, and I know where.”
“You live in a conveniently compartmented world,” Chumley remarked, smiling.
She tilted her head, thinking about that. “Sure. That’s how the world should be.”
“Well, since you came on the scene, this place is certainly getting more organized.”
She flashed him her wicked grin. “Not to mention more fun.” Then she put her hands on her hips and looked at the folders and papers scattered on the hardwood floor. “But now’s the time for organization rather than fun. Time to pay the pauper.”
“‘Piper,’ you mean.”
“Whoever.”
“You’re too good to me, you know that?”
“Uh-hm, part of my job.”
He tucked in his shirt, then rolled down and buttoned his sleeves and put on his tie, making sure the wide end overlapped the narrow. He knew his wife could be on the alert for any sign of irregular behavior in the city. When it came to that kind of thing, women had radar.
“Presentable?” he asked.
“At least.” She brushed off his suit coat and handed it to him.
He worked his arms into the coat. She stepped in close and buttoned it for him.
“You are something!” he told her again.
She smiled up at him. “You already said that.”
“Well, I think it’s worth repeating.”
She kissed him lightly on the lower lip, then nudged him toward the door. He hesitated, looking back at her.
“Don’t be late,” she said. “We don’t want questions.”
He nodded, then went out the door.
Deirdre picked up the still-glowing goose-neck lamp and placed it on the desk, then gathered some papers from the floor, rearranged them, and placed them in the In basket.
When she’d decided that Chumley was gone from the building and enough time had passed that it was unlikely he’d return, she went to the door and shot the deadbolt into its shaft. She rolled Chumley’s chair into the kneehole of his desk, then lowered the blinds. The office suddenly seemed smaller, quieter.
Still in her stockinged feet, Deirdre walked to the file cabinets and opened one of the bottom drawers. Squatting effortlessly so that her buttocks rested on her heels, she quickly found the hanging file folder she sought and lifted it from its steel tracks, then stood up and nudged the long drawer shut with the side of her foot.
She carried the folder to the copy machine and set to work, smiling.
26
Molly scooted over toward the window to make room for Michael. David sat across from them in the booth at the Choice Deli, on the corner two blocks down West Eighty-fifth Street from their apartment. The Choice had been at the same location for decades. Though the walls screamed for plaster-patch, their coat of rose-colored paint was fresh. The counter stools and booths were only a few years old, gray vinyl with a sparkling silver design salted throughout. A tall, slowly revolving glass display case near the cash register dated back to the fifties and somehow made the thick cream pies and cheesecakes look like delicious confections from childhood.
The waiter came over and they ordered an omelet for Molly, scrambled eggs and milk for Michael, a toasted corn muffin for David. Molly scooted the steaming coffee cup that the waiter had left, so it was well out of Michael’s reach, and stared at the back page of a Saturday Times the man two booths away was reading. A young woman from the Village had been raped and murdered near the East River, full-column news because it was in the area of Sutton Place, where the wealthy of New York didn’t factor possible murder into their plans.
The pretty, young victim was smiling mischievously in her photograph, as if someone had just told her an off-color but amusing joke. On that sunny day she’d been psychologically a million years from unexpected violent death, but in reality closer than she’d known when the camera’s shutter was tripped. The city had been waiting.
Michael stared up at Molly over his mustache of milk. “I’m hungry.”
“Everybody’s hungry,” David said.
Molly patted Michael’s wrist. “The food will be here soon,” she assured him. David handed him a pencil and he began scrawling crude stick figures on his napkin, his eyes sharply focused
and his lower lip tucked in with childish concentration.
Molly glanced out the window at the wet street. It had been drizzling from low, dark clouds since early morning. The sky looked like an upside-down gray bowl arcing inches above the tops of buildings. Along with the heat and almost tropical humidity, it helped to produce a claustrophobic feel to the city.
“Thank God it wasn’t raining yesterday at Bernice’s funeral,” Molly said.
“This isn’t your morning to run, is it?”
David changing the subject yet staying with the weather. Very adroit.
“Tomorrow,” Molly said.
He picked up the Times he’d wrestled from the corner vending machine and folded then started to read the front section. The smiling young woman who’d met her death near Sutton Place again stared at Molly from her newspaper photo.
The waiter arrived with their breakfasts, and David had to lay the paper on the seat beside him to make room.
When their coffee cups had been topped off and the waiter had left, Molly spread butter on Michael’s toast, then, at his insistence, jelly. He beamed when she gave in to his demands, then promptly stuck his elbow in the jellied toast as he reached for his milk.
David observed this and grinned. “He’ll clean up okay with a little soap,” he assured Molly.
“Deirdre called and offered to baby-sit him today while I work,” Molly said, using her napkin to wipe jelly from Michael’s arm.
“Take her up on the offer?”
“No. Julia called with the same offer. I told them both no. I think we should keep him home for a while, watch him for…you know, effects.” She lowered her voice to pronounce the last word, knowing even as she did so that it was silly. Michael was sitting right beside her and would hear. But he wouldn’t know that the effects she referred to were his possible reactions to Bernice’s death. Molly was worried about what the experience would do to him. Three-year-olds could accept these things with a matter-of-factness that eluded some adults. Yet on a deeper level the trauma and grief could leave a lasting scar.