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Copyright © 2013 by Jessica Anya Blau
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
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Contents
The Problem with Lexie
No. 7
Reading Guide Questions
About the Author
The Problem with Lexie
The problem wasn’t so much that Lexie had taken the Klonopin. And it wasn’t even really that she had stolen them. The theft of five pills (approximately one and a half down the gullet, three and a half in her purse) was less than two bucks. The problem, as Lexie saw it, was that she had fallen asleep atop the perfectly made bed of the owner of the Klonopin. And the owner of the Klonopin was the woman who happened to be the wife of her lover.
“Miss James?” Jen Waite said. Her dyed hair was blonder than Lexie’s and her pale face looked prettier than Lexie remembered from their single meeting—brow furrowed now, head tilted with concern.
Lexie sat up, her eyes wide open. She looked straight down at the white bedspread (at 33, she had yet to figure out how to make a bed this taut, this precise and military-like) and searched for the pill bottle. Yes, she remembered, she had put it back exactly in the spot in the medicine cabinet where she had found it, prescription label facing out.
“Miss James, are you OK?” Dear God, Daniel was in the room. And he was calling her Miss as if they hadn’t spent two nights in a row together just last week. As if he hadn’t whispered I love you into her ear, her neck, and the hairless, opalescent insides of her thighs.
Lexie was still in her high school counselor uniform; that is, she was wearing a sleek gray skirt, black tights, knee-high black boots, and a crisp white blouse. The outfit was a little hip for New Hampshire and certainly not preppy enough for the private boarding school where the beloved Waite son, Ethan, was one of a handful of students who had regular meetings with Lexie.
“Ambien!” Lexie said. She had remembered an article she’d recently read about people taking the sleeping pill and then unknowingly eating all of the leftovers in their refrigerator or driving to an ex-wife’s house and trying on her underwear.
“You need an Ambien?” Daniel asked. He was staring at her with a hard, distant look. There was no glint of recognition, no slyness of shared secrets, blended fluids, mixed scents.
“I haven’t been sleeping lately and I took one tonight and I must have driven over here on it—WOW!” Lexie tried to act as stunned as one might be if this had actually happened. “WOW. Can you believe it?!” Lexie got off the bed and straightened her clothes. She brushed her hand across the bedspread as if fleas or crumbs or something had fallen off her and been left behind. “Wow.”
“Wow,” Jen said. “That’s just crazy! Was the door unlocked?!” Jen looked at Daniel as if to accuse him, once again, of forgetting to lock the front door.
“I guess it was unlocked.” Lexie looked down at her boots. “Whoa! I must have dressed myself, too!”
“Don’t you live on campus?” Jen asked. She was still open-mouthed and wild-eyed. This would be a story for her next dinner party. Lexie hoped it would be the only story she’d tell involving her, Lexie. She didn’t want to be outed as that woman, the one who broke up a 20-year marriage by ruthlessly being the easy one in the husband’s life: the one who never asked him to stop at the drugstore and pick up vitamin C, never demanded that he not chew his cereal so loudly, never insisted that he refrain from making sexist jokes in front of company. No, Lexie knew her role in Daniel’s life, and she had stuck to it patiently, lovingly, devotedly. A girlfriend is so much more fun than a wife, and fun is exactly what Lexie had been giving Daniel for the past nine months.
“I do, I do,” Lexie said. “But my parents live about three miles up Winters Road, so I’m familiar with the area, of course, and what a lucky coincidence that of all the houses around here, yours was the one where I landed!”
The truth was this: Lexie had spent the beginning of the night slamming back tequila shots at some townie bar with Jane, her divorced friend. Later, when Jane and Lexie were both sponge-headed and antsy, Jane took off to visit her lover, who had been texting her all night, and Lexie took off to Frankton, one hour away, just to look at Daniel’s house. It was an act that seemed logical, even normal, at the time. This was the weekend of Daniel and Jen’s anniversary, and Daniel had told Lexie they would be at their Boston condo celebrating (Jen’s word, Daniel had said, not his).
There had been no plan to go into the house, but once she sat there long enough, Lexie wanted more. Entering the house felt like a way to merge herself with Daniel. Since their first kiss, Lexie had wanted little else.
She knew where the hidden key was (under a front-porch flowerpot, hardly what one would call hidden)—Daniel had shown it to her when the two of them rollicked in the house while Jen was in the city with friends for a museum weekend. Lexie had unlocked the door, returned the key, and entered.
For two hours, she’d wandered the three massive floors, examining the display of Daniel’s life. There was nothing about him that wasn’t interesting to her, including the rooms he inhabited and particularly the master bedroom which she purposely saved for last.
Daniel claimed he hadn’t made love to his wife in three years, since she had hit menopause. If this were true, there’d have been nothing in the bedroom to indicate any sexual activity (unlike in Lexie’s bedroom, where a box beneath the bed contained three different clitoral-heating gels and a bubble gum prize-size ring vibrator that she had picked up at Target for less than six dollars). The top of Jen’s night table was as bland as Lexie had expected—a stack of three books and a pair of delicate gold reading glasses. (Lexie wondered why she hadn’t taken a book and glasses with her. Had she been planning to break the dry spell as an anniversary present?) But in the night table drawer, beside the lip balm and a spool of dental floss, there was a giant, rubber-coated vibrator shaped like an exclamation point.
Lexie had sat on the bed and held up the vibrator. If Jen wasn’t interested in sex, why the appliance? The image of Daniel using the tool on his wife gave Lexie a swimming feeling in her stomach. She turned it on, listened to the gentle rumble, then shoved it up her skirt, forcing the round end against herself so she could feel it through her tights and underwear. Lexie’s stomach churned faster with the oncoming climax. And then, as she teetered on the edge of nausea, an orgasm shot through her body with a quick, biting fire that instantly died out.
Since puberty, Lexie had habitually sniffed at anything that had touched her crotch, and that moment had been no different—although she didn’t let the vibrator alight on her nose and instead waved it in front of herself like a perfume sample. The scent was oatmealy and dank. Lexie shoved the thing into her purse. If Daniel and Jen wanted to have sex with an implement, they’d have to buy a new one.
The medicine cabinet had been fascinating. Lexie opened the tubes and jars of Jen’s face creams and smeared a bit of everything on her cheeks, neck, and eyelids. Behind a firming cream, with the label facing out, was the generic Klonopin. Lexie had had a prescription herself during graduate school, when anxiety frequently crashed down on her like an iron frying pan against her skull. She had loved the way the drug dulled the raspy edges of her emotions, making her feel
like pudding ran in her veins and clotted cream cushioned her brain. She’d opened the bottle, poured the contents into her hand, and dry-swallowed one and a half, sticking another three and a half in her skirt pocket. And then, with a blind impulsiveness, she licked around the outside of the bottle.
At this time in her life, it was impossible for Lexie to explain herself even to herself. The best she could do was to imagine her brain as a blackboard where, until she met Daniel, she’d been chalking down directions, ideas, images of who she was and who she wanted to be. The man who had been her fiancé, Jeff, had been chalked onto that blackboard, too. He had been an ideal fit: the equation of Jeff plus the equation of Lexie added up to a perfectly logical number. Then Daniel entered, and it was like a wet rag had been smeared across the slate. In one single, swift motion, all the ideas and aspirations Lexie had for herself, her life, had been erased.
One week she had loved Jeff. The next she felt that being with him was like being trapped in a very crowded box nailed deep into the New Hampshire earth. With Daniel, Lexie felt as if she was in the middle of an exhilarating flying dream. Here was a man who was part of the greater world—he brokered deals in London, went to Rio de Janeiro for vacation, and had been to Asia so many times he could recommend a restaurant in every major city of each major country on the continent. When they had sex, Lexie felt like she was doing it with a rock star.
Yes, Lexie would have been comfortable enough with Jeff, but her life would have been as broad as four chinks in a chain. With Daniel, life felt limitless.
Two weeks after Daniel kissed her, Lexie broke off her engagement, moved out of the home she shared with Jeff, and took an open apartment on campus. Jeff was crushed, but Lexie had barely been able to register his pain. She was still in her flying dream, and the only time she landed was when the idea of Jen entered the airspace.
The night of her break-in, soon after taking Jen’s Klonopin, Lexie felt herself flattening into a loose sheet. She had to lie down, for just a minute, to gather the strength to search through Jen’s underwear drawer.
“You should stay here tonight,” Jen said. “It doesn’t seem safe to drive with that stuff in your system.”
“Short half-life,” Lexie said, waving her hand. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.” Lexie knew she was far from reaching the half-life of anything.
“Oh, please just stay,” Jen said. “I’ll blame myself if something happens to you on the road.” Jen extended a hand and placed it on Lexie’s forearm. How odd to be touched by the wife of your lover. It was such a gentle touch, so natural. And yet, Lexie hated it—it stirred up a soupy guilt for acts that, in the absence of a physical Jen, felt wonderfully free of consequences.
“She’ll be fine,” Daniel said, and he walked to the bedroom door and stood there as if to escort Lexie out.
“I’m sorry,” Jen said.
“Oh, please, I’m sorry,” Lexie said. For the first time, she could feel a sheen of shame growing on her flesh like an ill-fitted fish skin coat.
They stood motionless for a moment as if they were in a play and had each forgotten their blocking.
“Well, walk her to the car, at least, Danny!” Jen said.
Danny? Danny? Lexie had never heard that one before.
“Thank you, Mr. Waite.” The Mr. felt so foreign now, like a tin coin in Lexie’s mouth—the edges beveled and sharp. He had been Mr. Waite the first time they met. The second time she saw him, they kissed and he was never Mr. Waite again. Daniel once told Lexie that the moment he met her, he craved her body with the hunger of a starving man in a Turkish prison. Lexie had been meaning to look up Turkish prisons ever since, to see if they actually starved people in them. Her sense of Turkey was that it was a pretty cosmopolitan place as long as you stayed on the European side. But like everything else she’d intended to do, looking up Turkey would have to wait until her mind was able to focus on something other than Daniel.
“The fuck are you doing here?” Daniel whisper-yelled, leaning into the open car door. Lexie was sitting in her old, unreliable Saab. A sexy, fun car was hard to finance on her salary.
“I’m sorry. It was a mistake.” Lexie was confused by his voice—it was like Daniel was possessed by some alternate version of himself.
“It was a mistake that you took an Ambien, drove to my house, and went to sleep on the bed I share with my wife?” Daniel was actually gritting his teeth. Ethan had once described Daniel as speaking like this. Lexie hadn’t believed him then—she figured the story was gussied up to make Ethan look like the innocent victim. Lexie had enjoyed the boy’s story anyway—she savored her weekly sessions with Ethan. She found the multilevel experience of seeing Daniel from her own perspective as well the perspective of his son to be deeply gratifying. And the one time Ethan had discussed a fight his parents had had, on Christmas Eve, when Daniel had slept in the guest room, Lexie swooned with a twisted, yellow thrill. What greater joy is there than hearing that the man you love appears to be miserable when he’s not with you?
“The Ambien was a lie, I’m sorry,” Lexie said. She and Daniel had made a vow to always be open and honest with each other. The relationship with Jen had careened toward failure from the start, Daniel often said, as it had been launched on a lie. Jen’s lie, according to Daniel. She had told him she was a student at Smith when really she had dropped out after the first semester and was working as a reader for a blind professor at Harvard.
“So you deliberately drove out here? Why?”
Was there any explaining it? It seemed no more comprehensible than the Hiroshima blowout of love she felt for him. “I texted you this morning,” Lexie said. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“I didn’t answer because I was with my wife.” Daniel’s eyes looked so dark and solid that Lexie imagined she could flick her fingers right on his eyeball and he wouldn’t even feel it. She had never seen these eyes before. She wanted to click a lever so that the familiar eyes would show up, like switching to the next photo in a Viewfinder.
“Oh, yeah…weren’t you supposed to be in Boston this weekend for your anniversary?” The word anniversary knocked around Lexie’s throat like a stone in an empty tin can.
“Do you often come to my house when we’re in the city?” Daniel looked back at the house as if to check and see if Jen was watching them.
Lexie smiled to make the moment airy and light. Fun! She was the fun girlfriend! “No! Come on. Seriously?!”
Daniel spent every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in Boston for work while Jen stayed ensconced in what Daniel called Stately Waite Manor. Since they’d been seeing each other, Lexie had spent most Wednesdays in Boston with Daniel. She didn’t have dinner duty and study hall supervision on Wednesdays and could easily manage the 70-minute drive in, waking up early on Thursday to make it back to campus for the morning meeting.
Daniel shut the car door and stepped back as if to make room for Lexie to pull out. But she didn’t pull out. She sat there with her hands on the wheel staring at Daniel until he turned and walked back to the house. Pangs of breath went in and out in short, uneven spanks. The idea of crying flashed in Lexie’s head. But the swishy, whooshing fogginess of post-tequila Klonopin blotted out any strong emotion. It was like Lexie’s distress and shame were in a bottle floating out in the ocean, just ahead of her. Every time Lexie swam toward the bottle, trying to reach it, a giant wave came up, slapped her down, and washed her clean of even the idea of it. She couldn’t get close enough to her feelings to experience them.
Lexie started the car and edged onto the road. Once she was out of sight of the house, she pulled over, cranked up the emergency brake, and rolled down her window. She tossed her long hair so that it hung over the outside of the car door, then slowly rolled up the window, keeping as much hair trapped against the frame as possible while still being able to see straight through the windshield. It was a trick a long-haired friend from college had taught her. A way to be jerked awake if you accidentally nodded off while driving. Of
course, for the system to work, your head would have to fall forward or toward the passenger seat. A tilt to the left and you’d have to hope that the bonk against the glass would wake you.
Back on campus, the walk from the school parking lot to her apartment wouldn’t have been hard if she hadn’t been wearing the boots. But Lexie didn’t want to remove them and possibly be caught by students in shoe disarray. Kids were known to sneak out of their dorms at night and surely, at 2 a.m. on a Friday, someone would be prowling the brick-paved grounds. In fact, Lexie was in the thick of campus, Gothic buildings spired around her like castles made from dripping sand, when she saw Ethan Waite himself with Adrian, Jack, and Connor. Four seniors. Two of whom she had seen for school and family-related stress. All of whom she had taught in the human sexuality course that was required of every student in the school.
“Hey! Miss James!” Ethan said, and he teetered toward her. Seeing Ethan was almost as good as seeing Daniel. In fact, Lexie had had a teacher’s crush on Ethan since his freshman year. He was one of the rare boys who acted like a man, knew how to talk to women, and was charming and engaging while maintaining a posture of respect. If she had met Daniel and Jen during Ethan’s first three years of school, Lexie didn’t remember. By the time Lexie and Daniel shook hands at the family and faculty picnic in late August, Ethan was firmly embedded in Lexie’s heart and a regular stopover in her Rolodex of sexual fantasies. Lexie understood then that part of her inappropriate crush on Ethan Waite had to do with imagining the future of Ethan Waite. If he were to turn out anything like his father, she thought, once she’d finally met Daniel, he’d be leaps ahead of his sweet but somewhat predictable and conventional classmates.
“Hey, Ethan,” she said, looking the boys up and down. “Connor, Adrian, Jack.”
Mating Calls Page 1
