The Ditto List Read Online Free PDF Page A

to suggest her prospective attorney was a man of frantic and colossal accomplishment, D.T. went out to retrieve her. As he approached the couch she put down her outdated Vogue on the exact spot from which she had obtained it and rose to meet him.
    She was forty, perhaps, laboriously neat and hyper-alert, as though applying for a job for which she was unqualified. Her hair was short and shaggy, the color of collies, a tattered curtain across her forehead. Her brown eyes were outsized and ill-defined, doubtlessly sculpted with one of those long hairy tools promoted on TV. She was tall and slender, simply dressed and slightly sexless, careful. The ceramic glaze over her eyes would have caused some to wonder if she were drunk or drugged, but D.T. saw that look every day. His clients wore it like a mandala.
    The woman wiped her hand on her slacks, then extended it toward D.T. along with a firm smile. D.T. smiled back. Her name, she said, was Mareth Stone. After a minute of greeting and small talk while they walked to his private office, her firm rein of intellect upon emotion led D.T. to suspect she could serve as an exemplar of his First Principle of Modern Matrimony—at any given point in any marriage, the wife is more intelligent than the husband on any subject of importance.
    As she took her seat, D.T. glanced at the metal indicator in the top drawer of his desk. She was divorce client number 998. He was fast coming on a landmark. He clicked to the next digit and closed the drawer, uncertain whether he was cheered or depressed by the number of scalps he had accumulated.
    He offered Mareth Stone a drink and a cigarette and she declined them both. He mentioned the weather and an event of current controversy and she had interest in neither. He looked her over carefully and obviously and she neither squirmed nor preened. She made no effort to seem devastated or blasé. At which point curiosity drew him out of his doldrums. After twenty years he still wondered what had finally killed their marriage.
    â€œSo, Mrs. Stone. What seems to be the problem?”
    â€œI seem to need a lawyer.” Her lips didn’t quiver and her eyes didn’t leak. Unusual, but not unprecedented.
    â€œWhat makes you think so?”
    â€œI’ve been served with divorce papers. Haven’t I?”
    She reached into her bag and brought out an unsealed manila envelope and handed it to him. On it was the word “Divorce,” written with savagery in what he suspected was her hand.
    He removed the contents and scanned them quickly. “So you have,” he said. “Your husband’s lawyer is the best in the business, by the way, present company excepted. Was it a surprise?”
    â€œTotally.” She closed her bag and clasped her hands and adopted the clueless expression she seemed determined to wear no matter what.
    â€œHe hadn’t moved out, hadn’t found the secret of life in the form of a controlled substance or a teen-age swami or a woman half his age? Hadn’t smacked you on the nose? Nothing?”
    â€œNothing. At least nothing that conclusive.” Her lips disappeared momentarily and he guessed what curled them against her teeth was fury.
    â€œWhere is he now?”
    Her narrow, charmless face seemed to harden by the moment. “I have no idea.”
    â€œWhen did you see him last?”
    â€œThis morning at breakfast.”
    â€œAnd he said nothing about this?”
    â€œNot a word. And not a word last night, when we made what I foolishly assumed was love.”
    The disclosure was not premeditated and its candor seemed to alarm her. D.T. thought it possible she had never previously made public acknowledgment of her own participation in the sex act. The memory of profaned embrace jellied her eyes, but only momentarily.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said, after but a single sniffle.
    â€œDon’t be.” She was so quickly composed D.T. began to worry that she had bent her