The Ditto List (6 page)

“You're still a thousand light.”

“She's a paying customer, Bobby, and she looks to be in need of some heroics. We should be square in a month.”

Bobby E. Lee looked through the glass door thoughtfully. “Figured she was,” he said, and stuffed the check into the single pocket of his skin-tight shirt. “But be careful, Mr. J. When things tighten up, that kind throws in the towel.”

D.T. started to object, then stopped. Bobby was too often right about the nuance of personality. His sense of which clients had firmly decided to divorce and which were only window-shopping was unerring, as was his sense of which of them needed tact and which a rather brutal shove. D.T. often wondered what he would do without Bobby E. Lee. The answer was always distressing.

D.T. went back to his office and reviewed the monthly statements once again, reducing three more of them in light of the affluence of his most recent client. The statements ready for the mail, he changed the cassette in his deck and let his blood squirt to the beat of Doug Kershaw while he noted on his calendar the day that morning's interlocutory decrees would become final. On that date, six months hence, Bobby E. Lee would send each participant in the Friday Fiasco a single red rose along with a certified copy of the final judgment of dissolution. Half the time the envelope and the flower were returned. Addressee unknown. No forwarding address. Starting over elsewhere.

D.T.'s phone rang. When he picked it up he was greeted warmly by his only ex-wife. “Jazzercise?” D.T. said after she had said his name.

“Keeps me trim, darling. I had to do something since I stopped having sex on a regular basis.”

“Oh? Religious reasons?”

“More aesthetic, I would say. Middle-aged bodies are so untidy. Present company excepted, of course. I always liked your body, D.T. It was your mind I couldn't handle.” Her laugh reminded him of engines.

They had been married over six years of wrangles, jousts, and contests, during which D.T. had failed to adjust to her money and she had failed to adjust to his misanthropy. Now they had been divorced over three years of weekly phone calls. Over that time, talking to Michele about subjects they had been too insecure to discuss while wed had been D.T.'s close-to-favorite moments and, he hoped and suspected, his ex-wife's as well.

“So how are you, D.T.?” Michele asked as she always did.

“Good-to-better, Michele. How about you?”

“My yeast infection cleared up so I'm fine and dandy and looking for love.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“How was the Friday Fiasco?” she asked.

“About average.”

“That bad?”

“Afraid so.”

“Why do you keep
on
, D.T.? I know you've had offers from other firms. Landon Towers was telling me the other night that he's been trying to get you to go in with him for over a year. They must have thirty lawyers now.”

“Forty-five.”

“Which means someone else could take care of your damsels in distress and you could do something dignified, to say nothing of remunerative.”

“Landon Towers wants me to do bankruptcy work. Ever spend an hour in bankruptcy court, Michele? Compared to it,
Queen for a Day
was a noble enterprise. Besides, the Friday Fiasco's as close as I'll ever come to participating in the forgiveness of sins.” He shifted gears and hoped she would follow, stifling her instinct to reform him. “You still getting married?”

“I suppose so. Are you still going to give me away? You're the only one there is, you know.”

“I'm perfectly happy to give you away, Michele. Just not to George.”

“Yes, well, we've been through
that
, haven't we?”

“Yes, we have.”

George was, among other things such as the owner of a wholesale fabric business, about to become an exemplar of D.T.'s Second Principle of Modern Matrimony, the one which states that in a modern woman's second marriage, the husband has the backbone of a grape. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your call, D.T.?” Michele asked sweetly. “Thursday night poker leave you short again?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“A nonpositive cash flow over the near term, was, I believe, the way you put it last time.”

“Something like that.”

“How much?”

“A thousand would be fine.”

“And where would that put us?”

D.T. didn't have to think; the figure was stamped on the fore edge of his mind. “Seventeen-five,” he said “I've got it all down in my ledger.”

“How CPAish of you. Shall I mail it?”

“I'll pick it up tonight around six,” D.T. said quickly. “Just leave it with Mirabelle, why don't you? Then I won't have to bother you.”

“Oh, you don't bother me, D.T. Not any more. In fact, I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Me, either.”

“I wasn't speaking in the financial sense, D.T.”

“Me, either.”

“Liar,” she charged, then paused that pause and D.T. steeled himself. “You know, D.T.,” she went on softly, “I told you the day we divorced that we could still have sex whenever you wanted. Do you remember?”

“Sure.”

“So how come we haven't? Just out of curiosity.”

“I don't know,” D.T. mumbled. “Maybe because there are only about three things I do regularly that keep me above the creatures that live in the slime and I think that's one of them.”

“What are the other two?”

“The Friday Fiasco and there used to be something else but now I can't remember what it is. I guess there are only two.”

Michele laughed. “Well, I'll forgive you for not treating me like a call girl, D.T. But I won't forgive you if you start treating me like a branch bank.”

“No danger of that, Michele. I hardly ever have dreams about branch banks.”

“Do you really dream about me, D.T.?”

“Sure.”

“What do we do?”

“Things.”

“Old things or new things?”

“Both.”

“How exciting. Will you tell me about them some night? In all their throbbing details?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Michele paused. When she spoke her words were round as plums. “You don't have to be afraid of me any more. You know that, don't you, D.T.?”

“I know that the same way I know I can't get VD off a toilet seat, Michele.”

She laughed again. “You're not all bad, D.T. Not all bad at all. Maybe I'll see you this evening. George isn't picking me up till eight.”

“Maybe so,” D.T. said, immediately planning how to get hold of the check without encountering her. Michele on the phone was one thing; Michele in her sixteen-room mansion dressed for dinner at a restaurant that didn't open for lunch or bother to list its prices was something else again.

“Are you still seeing Barbara, by the way?” Michele asked as he was about to say good-bye.

“Yep.”

“She's good for you, you know.”

“So she tells me.”

“Do you want some advice?”

“No,” D.T. said quickly. “I'll pick up Heather at ten tomorrow. Dress her for the out-of-doors.”

“Oh?”

“Zoo.”

“God, D.T. Do you know how many times she's been to that pitiful zoo? The monkeys think she's a cousin from L.A. Give her a break.”

“The museum of natural history?”

“That's just a zoo that died, D.T.”

“Planetarium?”

“Last month, with the enrichment class.”

“Aquarium?”

“You know she hates fish. Alive or cooked.”

“Art museum?”

“At her age?”

“Why not? Indoor dress. Ten sharp. Take it easy, Michele.”

“Easy's the only way it comes when you drive a Rolls, D.T.”

Michele's trouble was that she believed it. D.T.'s trouble was that it seemed to be true.

Bobby E. Lee stuck his head in the door. “A Lucinda Finders is here. Better get the tissues out.” The door closed without further explanation.

D.T. looked at his watch and decided to hurry the day to its conclusion. After putting Mareth Stone's papers in his Out Box, he went to fetch a client that Bobby E. Lee had only to lay eyes on to know was swaddled in a story that would in a very short time erupt in tears on the other side of D.T.'s battered desk.

She was young, too young to be married or divorced, too young to be seeing a lawyer for any reason. She was also pregnant, and too young to be that, as well. Beneath a hood of blonde curls she looked at him bravely, with a sunny, shadeless face that not many years ago would have sucked many a boy into puberty before his time and would now cause many a man to assume she had been created solely for his pleasure.

Her blue eyes skipped quickly over D.T.'s face, to see if it was going to be as bad as she feared. “Hi,” she said simply, and stood and walked toward him on triangles of wood that made her thighs seem hydraulically propelled. D.T. bet himself she had first had sex when she was fifteen, and had no idea then or now that there were people in the world who thought it wicked to partake at such an age.

He took her hand and bowed. The girl inhaled with surprise, as though she had feared herself untouchable. She had somehow outgrown her skin and her clothes as well, her blouse so taut across her breasts and belly he feared its buttons would soon be missiles. D.T. had an urge to laugh, mostly because he sensed there would be nothing else to laugh about till she left his office.

As he released her hand he noticed her little finger was bent unnaturally, twisted, then frozen in an arc. When she saw him notice it she rubbed the finger on her stomach, then hid it behind her back. D.T. glanced at Bobby E. Lee, who shook his head out of what D.T. guessed was pity.

“Come in and sit down.” D.T. said. “Can we get you some coffee?” When she passed him he saw that her flesh was as white and flawless as her slacks, which were tight enough to line her crevasses.

“No, thanks,” she said when she was seated.

“A Coke?”

“No. Really. I'm fine.” Her twang was of the type that came often out of D.T.'s radio, accompanied by steel guitars and backup singers and words of rue or longing.

D.T.'s stomach began to burn. He looked in the wide drawer of his desk for a mint but found only the number 999. He pushed the little metal counter to 1,000, which confirmed his sense that the girl was somehow special, a carrier of curse or blessing. “What's your name again?” he began, with something leaden in his heart.

“Lucinda Finders.”

“Where you from?”

“The valley. Reedville.”

“What do your parents do?”

“Farm. Onions, mostly. Some beets.”

“But you live in the city now?”

She nodded. “Come after high school with my girlfriend Ruth. Went to beauty school for a while but it didn't take.”

“Why not?”

“Them chemicals they use made me swell up.”

The words reminded her of her current condition. She looked at her stomach and didn't seem happy with what she saw. He expected her to reach for the tissues but instead she reached in her purse for a pack of gum. As she unwrapped a stick of Spearmint her crooked finger curled away from the foil in a silly parody of elegance. D.T. asked her how old she was.

She got the gum chewed to where she wanted it. “You got a bathroom? I'm sorry, but I got to pee every two minutes since this baby come along.” Her statement was simple fact, uncomplicated by embarrassment.

He smiled and pointed toward the door across the room. She left him and closed the door behind her. He heard musical, flutish sounds, then the rush of water. When she came back her hair was combed.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You look younger.”

“Everyone says that. Don't know why, unless it's 'cause I stay out of the sun.”

D.T. took a breath and held it, reluctant, gripped by his frequent feeling that his job had become uncouth. He exhaled a breeze that caused the curls that framed her face to flap. “Well? What seems to be your problem, young lady?”

“I need me a divorce.” Her lips tightened down on the words, providing them with splints.

“How long have you been married?”

“Eight months and three days.'

“Not long.”

“Long enough, I guess.” She tried and failed to become flip. “There ain't a waiting period, is there?”

D.T. shook his head. “Are you sure about this or are you just thinking about it.”

“I'm sure,” she said, sounding surer than D.T. had ever been of anything.

“What's your husband's name?”

“Del. Delbert Wesley Finders.”

“Where is he now?”

“Home, I guess. We got a trailer in a park out on Simpson Boulevard.”

“Where are you staying?”

“My sister's place.”

“You want to go back to the trailer?”

“The trailer's Del's.”

“Not necessarily. We can probably order him to vacate if you want to.”

She shook her head. “Marilyn's is okay. For now.”

“Is it in the city?”

“On Sixty-fifth Street. Out by the Century Mall.” She told him the number.

D.T. knew the area. It was a sad sheet of lower-class whites with no jobs, no money, and no sense of anything except that they were sinking out of sight of anyone but the government. More of his 999 clients than he could count lived out there. “What happened between you and Delbert?”

“You mean why do I want the divorce?”

D.T. nodded and waited. He wished he was somewhere in public, where private woe would not be uttered. He decided not to see any more clients on Fridays. Not on top of the Fiasco.

Lucinda didn't answer for a moment. D.T. sensed she was reviewing the entire eight months and three days of her marriage, weighing its merit, deciding once again whether it was right to be where she was, do what she was doing, say what she was about to say. “Del beats up on me sometimes,” she murmured finally.