Old Flames
Jack Ketchum
LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY
So Easy To Do
“So all I need from you now is proof of identity for our insurers, credit card, and driver’s license. I already have your address, work address and phone numbers. That and of course your check.”
She handed him the cards. She wrote the check.
“So how long…?”
“A week, tops. Maybe less.”
“Really?”
“Quite possibly less. Could be a matter of a day or two.” He smiled. “Listen. You’d better get ready to meet him or phone him or write him, Ms. Welles, however you’ll want to handle it. Because I think you can consider this as good as done. Mr. Weymouth’s back in your life again. To whatever extent you want him there…”
Thanks to Shay Astar, Jordan Auslander,
Alan Difiore and Paula White.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
So Easy To Do
Dedication
Old Flames
Epigraph
Chapter One: Dora and Owen
Chapter Two: Dora
Chapter Three: Dora and Will
Chapter Four: Will
Chapter Five: Dora
Chapter Six: Dora
Chapter Seven: Dora
Chapter Eight: Dora
Chapter Nine: Dora
Chapter Ten: Karen
Chapter Eleven: Matthew
Chapter Twelve: Jim and Karen
Chapter Thirteen: Jim and Dora
Chapter Fourteen: Matthew
Chapter Fifteen: Linda
Chapter Sixteen: Dora
Chapter Seventeen: Dora and Karen
Chapter Eighteen: Dora
Chapter Nineteen: Dora, Matthew, and Linda
Chapter Twenty: Dora
Chapter Twenty-One: Linda
Chapter Twenty-Two: Jim, Dora, and Matthew
Chapter Twenty-Three: Linda
Chapter Twenty-Four: Dora
Chapter Twenty-Five: Linda
Chapter Twenty-Six: Matthew
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Jim
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Laura Foster, Greg Lambert, and Bob and Nellie Bates
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Ensemble
Chapter Thirty: Old Flames
Right to Life
Epigraph
The First Day
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Second Day
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
The Third Day
Chapter Twelve
Three Weeks
Chapter Thirteen
Gestation
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Delivery
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Praise
Other Books By
Copyright
Old Flames
Epigraph
A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
ONE
Dora and Owen
So here I am again, she thought. This is far too familiar.
There was pain of course but she embraced the pain as she always did. He was big and she was not, so she could count on pain with him. Tears and sweat were pretty much the same thing anyway she thought. She was opposed to neither.
But there was yearning. That old unwanted acquaintance.
She wanted—maybe even needed this time—to see his face. A face could speak what the body didn’t. His body told her he was close to coming. As was she. But that was all it told her. A glance over her shoulder was insufficient. Especially in the dark. And Owen insisted on his bedroom dark the way he insisted on taking her from behind.
But here in this room on this bed while he filled her he was emptying her too. She could feel a winding down. She fought that. Pushed back hard into his tight flat belly as though the slap of impact flesh against flesh and his own sounds, his grunts and moans and harsh breathing could meld into an invisible wind that might whirl around and enter her again through her open mouth and ears and eyes.
She wanted to be filled. Instead she relinquished wanting.
It was all she could do.
He woke in the dark and turned the clock toward the glow of the city lights below through the screened window. Never mind that his was a penthouse apartment. New York was never wholly dark.
He rose naked out of bed, careful not to wake her and turned and watched her roll slowly over into the space he’d left behind and nestle into what remained of his heat and thought how young and innocent she looked though she was neither and considered how to phrase his note to her.
He was still considering that when he stepped out of the shower. In the kitchen over coffee he did as best he could and then he went to work.
Owen told her once that he’d chosen the clock for the pitch and tone of its alarm as much as for its design so that when it intruded on her sleep it did so like a handshake, firm but gentle too. She turned it off and listened to the silence for a moment and knew that the apartment was empty. Owen was an early riser. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one. Owen didn’t approve but he didn’t try to stop her either.
She lay back into the pillows and watched the smoke billow and drift above her. She thought that smoking was in a strange way a collaborative thing. Something human and yet not. Its trajectory could be managed by you but not completely. Its texture appeared random or somehow ordained by the mere fact of burning but a movement of the hand or a breath of air could shape it differently, turn it this way or that.
Here was proof that you existed she thought. You smoked and all at once your very breath had substance.
Who said that smoking was just a dirty habit? There was poetry.
Coffee she thought. You’re still dreaming. You need coffee.
He’d made a fresh pot and left it on for her which she thought considerate and poured herself a cup and then opened and read the note he’d propped against the coffeemaker and though she drank what was in her cup the pot and its contents were the first to go.
The offices of Mars Black Design were at Fifth and Fifty-fourth Street. She stepped out of the cab and crossed Fifth Avenue at a yellow light which turned red half her way across. Horns blared. They could blare all they cared to. In New York City pedestrians trumped cars every time. Pedestrians wearing Armani in particular.
She signed in and nodded to the solemn young man at the security desk and took the elevator to the eleventh floor and stepped out into the immaculate stark white reception room. She noted a well-dressed middle-aged man in a plush leather chair frowning into the Wall Street Journal and judged him a prospective client and another much younger man whose portfolio beside him indicated a new or aspiring designer and a Federal Express messenger receiving a signature on his clipboard from Gloria at the desk—Gloria who first smiled at her and then looked alarmed.
“Dora? He’s with a client…”
She threw open the smoked-glass door to his office hard enough so that it rebounded off the wall and closed again behind her. She felt a moment’s disappointment that it didn’t shatter. He was standing behind his desk with a short fat bald man standing in front of it and he’d been showing the man some plans but it was clear that at the moment she’d driven those plans from their minds quite well.
“Just who the fuck do you think you are, Owen?” she said.
“Dora…this
is not the time…”
“Excuse me. You. Get out.”
The fat man just looked at her. Nice tie, she thought.
“Dora…?”
“Did you hear me? I said get out!”
“Another time, Owen, okay?” The man backed away.
“George…I’m sorry. I’ll call you, okay?”
“Sure, Owen.”
He closed the door quietly behind him. She pulled out the note from her purse.
“What are you? Some kind of goddamn schoolkid? A fucking note you leave for me? You don’t even have the balls for a phone call? ‘I can only hope you won’t think too badly of me…we’ve not felt close for some time…I’ll always care…’ Jesus Christ, Owen! What kind of bullshit is this?”
“It’s the truth, Dora…”
“Who is she, you bastard.”
“There’s nobody, for god’s sake.”
“You’re a fucking liar. You couldn’t tie your own goddamn shoes without a woman around to help you. ‘I’ll always care for you…’ I want to know who she is. Are you listening to me?”
The Qing vase on the podium beside her was a favorite of his. It dated from the late seventeenth century. Had stood on a windowsill at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England for forty years.
It made a loud unlovely sound against the wall.
He looked stricken. Staring at the pieces strewn across the floor. She smiled.
“You should see your apartment,” she said.
“Goddammit! I’ll sue you, you bitch!”
“No you won’t. It’d make the papers. I’d damn well see it did.”
She moved toward him around the desk. Moved in close. To his credit he stood his ground.
“I’m waiting. How well do you like your little Klee over there?”
She wondered what he was seeing in her face. Whatever it was he folded.
“Nobody,” he said. “Nobody you know.”
And she found that while she’d expected as much, even knew as much, some poor sad part of her hadn’t really. Had hoped that it wasn’t true even up to now. Women were such fucking fools, she thought. Whoever this one was, was probably just as stupid about men as she was. She nodded.
“Nobody I know.”
“Ex-wife of a client, Bill Curtis. You’ve never met her.”
“I’ve met Bill, though, haven’t I. How does Bill feel about this?
“I have no idea, Dora.”
The rage was gone, played out. Shattered along with the vase. For a strange unsettling moment she wasn’t even sure why she was here. She turned and walked to the door and stopped with her back to him. Her back was all he would get.
“You might want to ask her,” she said. “If you feel like it, of course. I mean, it’s all about you.” She shook her head. “I haven’t used this word in years. But you really do suck, Owen, you know that? In the true meaning of the word? It means all you do is take.”
She could hear him sigh.
“What the hell,” she said. “Pretty much all of you do.”
TWO
Dora
In front of the entrance to the bar they had planted a tree curbside and surrounded it with cedar chips and a low ornamental wire fence to keep the dogs at bay. Dozens of cigarette butts had turned the chips into a trash heap. She wondered why anybody would do that and poison a perfectly good tree when there was plenty of sidewalk, street and curb around. Maybe smoking was just a dirty habit after all. Or maybe smokers were just as mean as the next guy.
Hers went into the sand-filled concrete urn by the door.
The bar was the adjunct to an upscale East Side restaurant. It was dimly lit and the wood was mahogany. All they played was piano music and they kept it low which was perfect for her mood. Her workday had not been the distraction she’d hoped for.
It was not yet five o’clock so she had a choice of seats at the bar and took one at the far right corner away from the window and the barman in white starched shirt and bow tie smiled and said good evening ma’am and asked what could he get her. She told him an apple martini and watched him while he mixed and shook and poured it for her into a frosted glass all the way to the rim. She reached for it with a steady hand and sipped.
It was aromatic, cold, delicious.
By the time she finished that one and another the seats at the bar were filled and so were the dozen or so tables and the noise level had risen to the point where she could barely hear the music. Her limit was two normally but this time she decided to push it. As her martini appeared so did a young man standing to her left. He wore wide suspenders and an expensive tailored shirt and power tie and was in all possibility fifteen years her junior. A not quite so nerdy Larry King in his twenties.
“Hi,” he said.
She looked at him and what she saw was cocky and grinning and holding a bottle of New Belgium Sunshine Wheat beer.
“Oh for god’s sake,” she said. She sipped her drink.
“Hey. What? What’d I do?”
She could think of nothing to say to that so she said nothing and then she heard her name.
“Dora? Dora Welles?”
She turned and saw a woman moving toward her past the yuppie in the power tie who decided to move on to territories a bit less fraught with nettles. The woman was about her own age and smiling and very accessorized but tastefully so, a bit overweight, holding what appeared to be a manhattan. It took Dora a moment to recognize her but when she did she gasped and got off her barstool and hugged her.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Estha! You look…”
“Me? Look at you! You look wonderful! This is amazing. My god it’s been, what?”
“Twenty-odd years?”
“Twenty-five but hey, who’s counting. What are you doing here?”
“Drinking, same as you. I live here. Here in the City I mean. You?”
“Maine. Portland. I’m just in for a sales conference. My god. Dora.”
“Estha.”
They laughed and hugged again. They hadn’t been all that close in high school but Dora had always liked her. They had intelligence in common which in that school was rare enough but had moved in largely different circles. Dora was all visual arts and literature and Estha was math and science. And now, apparently, sales. Computers and electronics. She finished her manhattan and ordered another while Dora nursed her martini. Dora told her they had sales in common.
“I run an antique store over here on Madison,” she said.
“Madison. Pricey, yes?”
“Oh yes. Pricey indeed.”
“Ever get up to Maine?”
“Every now and then. I travel a lot to estate sales. I have a partner who runs things while I’m away.”
“You have to call me next time. Will you?”
“Sure. Of course I will.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You married?”
“I was. About a thousand years ago. Don’t remind me.”
“Me too. Mine left me up to my ears in debt.”
“I was a little luckier than that.”
In fact it was the settlement from Sam that had opened and paid the first two years’ rent on the store.
“So get this. First mine leaves me, then he goes and buys a condo in Honolulu with some little pineapple princess from Maui and they’re all set up on the beach selling hermit-crab jewelry to the tourist trade. Who the hell would want to buy one I don’t know. Can you imagine having this awful little spidery bug-thing crawling over your boobs while you’re eating roast pig at some fucking luau? Got any kids?
“No.”
“Me neither, thank god. Ohmygod you missed the party!”
“What party?”
“The reunion! Didn’t anybody phone you?”
“I’ve been kind of out of touch. We had a reunion? What reunion?”
“Twenty-fifth, silly. Just a couple months ago. Oh god, you should have been there. Let’s see…Laura Winger was th
ere, Jimmy Baron, Arnie Hill, Daniella whatsername, Lydia Pincus…”
“Nichols. Daniella Nichols.”
“Right. I’ve got to tell you. We girls looked a whole lot better than the men did. I mean, all their hair had shifted. Half of them bald as hell with funny little beards and mustaches so that you couldn’t even recognize them. Anyway, everybody was there. A really terrific turnout. It was amazing.”
“How about…”
“Jim Weybourne. No. He was one of the no-shows. Sorry.”
She was surprised by the real regret in Estha’s voice. Though probably she shouldn’t have been. Everybody in her class back then knew that Dora and Jim were quite the item. For a while, inseparable. And everybody back then seemed to be rooting for them, pretty much expected them to marry. She’d been much too young to marry. And of course there was the other thing.
Estha brightened.
“My guy was a no-show too. Remember Ralphie Begleiter?”
“Sure I do. Second in the class, wasn’t he?”
“Third. Well, have I got a story for you.”
Estha glanced over her shoulder and as if on cue just such a balding and bewhiskered man as she’d described was making his way toward them through the crowd at the bar. He was smiling and bearish with a good dark suit and just a hint of a paunch. He was also beaming at them.
“Hey, Dora.”
“I’ll be goddamned. Ralphie!”
“I go out for a smoke and look what I find when I get back. Hey, come here. Gimme a hug.”
His hug was bearish too. After the day she’d had it felt close to wonderful.
“How you doin’? You look…sensational.”
“Thank you. I’m fine. But I…”
“I know,” Estha said. “You’re confused. He wasn’t at the reunion, right? Exactly. So what the hell, I just went out and found him!”