The Trouble with Lexie Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my daughters, Madeline Tavis

  and Ella Grossbach

  EPIGRAPH

  Love is like a fever, which comes and goes quite independently of the will.

  —Stendhal

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Fall Semester Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Spring Semester Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  One Year Later

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . * About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Also by Jessica Anya Blau

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THE PROBLEM WASN’T SO MUCH THAT LEXIE HAD TAKEN THE KLONOPIN. And it wasn’t even that she had stolen them. At thirty generic pills for ten dollars, the theft of a handful (one down the gullet, the rest down her bra) had to be less than . . . seven bucks? The problem, as Lexie saw it, was that she had fallen asleep in the bed of the owner of the Klonopin. And the owner of the Klonopin was 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 at Parents’ Weekend—brow furrowed now, head tilted with concern.

  Lexie looked down at herself. Her fitted red dress was scrunched up to her hips and she wasn’t wearing underwear. A shadow of hair trailed from crotch to midthigh. Lexie tried to yank the dress down but her brain-hand-body coordination was off and she couldn’t manage the required butt-lift.

  “Miss James, do you know where you are?” Jen Waite said.

  Lexie managed to sit up. Her eyes were wide open. She looked straight down at the tightly made bed (at thirty-three, she had yet to figure out how to make a bed this perfectly, this hotel- or military-like) and thought about the pill bottle. Yes, she remembered, she had put it back exactly where she had found it. Prescription label facing out, as it had been when she’d first spotted the drugs in the medicine cabinet.

  “Miss James, are you okay?” Dear god, Daniel was in the room. And he was calling her Miss, as if they hadn’t spent an entire week together in this very house only last month. As if they hadn’t spent two nights together every week for the past eight months. As if he had never whispered I love you into her ear, her neck, and the usually hairless and opalescent insides of her thighs.

  No. Daniel was calling her Miss as if their only relationship were through Ethan, the beloved Waite son, who earlier in the year had been one of Lexie’s student patients at The Ruxton Academy. Ethan’s condition had been nothing serious, nothing even half-serious: college-application-related stress, an exceedingly ho-hum and common ailment at the elite boarding school.

  “Ambien!” Lexie finally said. She had read stories of people taking the sleeping pill and then eating all the dairy out of their refrigerator or driving to their ex-wife’s house and trying on her underwear.

  “You need an Ambien?” Daniel was staring at her with a hard, distant look. There was no glint of recognition, no slyness of shared secrets, mixed fluids, merged scents. “You’re missing a shoe.” He pointed at Lexie’s bare right foot. On her left foot was the strappy high-heeled sandal she had originally bought for her planned wedding. Of course, she had intended to wear both shoes to the blessed event.

  “I haven’t been sleeping lately and I took an Ambien 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?!” She got off the bed and pulled down her dress. She brushed her hand across the bedspread as if fleas or crumbs had fallen off her. “Wow.”

  “Wow,” Jen said. “That’s crazy! Was the door unlocked?” Jen looked at Daniel as if to accuse him of once again forgetting to lock the front door.

  “I guess it was unlocked. I don’t even remember coming in!”

  “Don’t you live on campus?” Jen was openmouthed and wild-eyed. This would be a story for her next dinner party. Lexie hoped it would be the only story Jen told involving Lexie. Until earlier in the night, Lexie hadn’t understood that she was that woman. The one who may have broken up a twenty-year marriage by ruthlessly being the easy one in a man’s life: never asking him to stop at the drugstore and pick up vitamin C, never demanding that he not chew his cereal so loudly, never insisting that he refrain from making sexist jokes in front of company. Always interested in sex.

  “I do live on campus, but I have a friend who lives nearby on Scarborough Road, so I’m familiar with the area . . .” Lexie pointed toward the window as if Scarborough Road were right there, although she wasn’t even sure if it was within thirty minutes of the Waite house. She had passed a street sign for Scarborough Road during the drive over and remembered only because when she had read the sign, Simon and Garfunkel had started singing “Scarborough Fair” in some far away, echoey nook in her head.

  “Oh, who do you know on Scarborough?” Jen smiled. She seemed happy to know they might have a mutual friend.

  “What a lucky coincidence that of all the houses around here, yours was the one where I landed!” Lexie rolled right over the question. The muck in her brain couldn’t coalesce enough to come up with a name.

  “I guess that is lucky,” Jen said.

  “Well, I better get outta here.” Lexie looked back at the bed as if she had forgotten something.

  “No! You have to stay tonight,” Jen said. “It’s not safe to drive with that stuff in your system, and we have plenty of bedrooms.”

  “Short half-life”—Lexie waved her hand—“I’ll be fine.” She knew she was far from reaching the half-life of anything.

  “Oh, please stay. 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 had, in the past, felt wonderfully liberating.

  “She’ll be fine.” Daniel went to the bedroom door and stood there, stiffly, as if to escort Lexie out.

  “I’m sorry,” Jen said. She shot her eyes toward Daniel to scold him for his rudeness.

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry.” Lexie felt a sheen of shame growing on her flesh like a fish-skin coat.

  “Should we look for your shoe?” Jen glanced around the room.

  “My shoe?” Lexie looked down at her leather sack-like purse that sat on the floor by the bed. The rubber edge of Jen’s vibrator peeked out the top of Lexie’s bag like a periscope. Lexie swooped down and hoisted the bag up onto her shoulder. She shook the bag a little, allowing the vibrator to burrow out of sight. “No, don’t bother. I’m pretty sure I left it at my apartment.” Lexie forced a smile and then shrugged her shoulders as if this were a comical, weekend mishap. Something that might happen in a sitcom or a romcom starring a sitcom star.

  For a few seconds, Lexie, Jen, and Daniel all stood motionless as if they were in a play and had each forgotten their blocking.

  “Well, walk her to the car, at least, Dann
y!” Jen said at last.

  Danny? Lexie had never heard that one before. “Thank you, Mr. Waite,” she said. The Mr. felt foreign now, like a tin coin in Lexie’s mouth, the edges beveled and sharp.

  Daniel once told Lexie that the instant 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 so much else the past few months, looking up Turkey was something she’d never gotten around to.

  Fall

  SEMESTER

  1

  IT WAS THE LAST DAY OF PARENTS’ WEEKEND AND LEXIE WAS thinking about sex. She didn’t necessarily want to be thinking about sex, but the startlingly handsome father who was only one table away was staring at her in a way that rang a bell inside her that tolled sex, sex, sex. In the end, we’re just a bunch of monkeys, Lexie thought as she noted, uncomfortably, how a simple gaze could set her off like this. Lexie looked away. Why encourage him? She was almost angry at the intrusion into her mindspace—mad that he was sending out pheromones that were clicking against her like hail on a copper roof.

  Lexie wasn’t sure whose father the handsome man was, as the seat to his right was currently empty. To his left was Nic Patel (who was a photocopy of his father beside him). On the other side of the empty seat was an elegant blond woman who appeared to be texting or emailing on her cell phone. Was this distracted woman his wife? Lexie focused on the space where the table met the man’s torso—she was waiting for his left hand to emerge in order to spot the ring finger. Alas, no movement. The staring man stretched his right arm out, spanning it atop the vacant chair like a pin-striped wing. His shoulders were so broad it looked like he had a lacrosse stick stuck in his suit. There were flecks of gray in his black hair, but only around the temples. Lexie’s guess was that he was fifty, an age Lexie, at seventeen years younger than that, thought of as too old, even when you looked as good as this guy did. She turned her face away again.

  More than once, Lexie had been mistaken for a student. She didn’t really look high-school-aged, but if you blurred your eyes a bit and took in only the loose, long, honey-blond hair and her slenderness, she might pass for nineteen. Lexie hoped this guy wasn’t some perv who thought she was a student. Without meaning to do so, she looked back at him. He was still staring at her. She looked away and dropped her head so he couldn’t see that she was flattered, smiling. Don’t look again, Lexie told herself, and she forced her focus on the boy seated next to her, Bruno. With self-conscious deliberation, Lexie moved Bruno’s water glass out of the way as if he were a two-year-old who might knock it over.

  As the school counselor, Lexie was seated with a group of kids whose parents didn’t, or couldn’t, make it to Parents’ Weekend. There were quite a few; plenty of people in Europe and Asia shipped their kids off to The Ruxton Academy in the hope that it would set them up—like a stone in a catapult—for admission into the Ivy League. Lexie looked around her table: Bruno Carrera, Xu Li, Grace Pak, Magnus Skaarsgard, Allison Delury, Piet Cowenberg, and Liam Walsh. With the exception of Magnus, who was pushing six-three, they all looked young, making Lexie easily identifiable as the adult. At least the staring father couldn’t think she was a student.

  Ruxton’s headmaster, Don McClear, was speaking at a podium while the first course—green salad—was being served. Don was saying something about character, community, the integration of these boarding school kids into the small Massachusetts town surrounding the school (where the average income was certainly less than a year’s tuition at Ruxton). Lexie had heard it all before. Don was sincere in his passion for Habitat for Humanity and the Clean Woods Project. Every kid at Ruxton (grades nine through twelve) did forty hours of service a year. But Lexie couldn’t summon any interest in all that. She was distracted, edgy, feeling a little vulnerable. If students and faculty weren’t strictly forbidden from using their phones in the dining hall, she’d have had hers out thirty minutes ago with a game of Yahtzee going full swing. Firmly, Lexie kept her back to the black-haired, square-jawed man with the powerful shoulders.

  Peter, Lexie’s fiancé, had no shoulders of note. Yes, he was fit. Yes, he was attractive—a biker who managed to wear skintight spandex shorts and not look like a character out of a Saturday Night Live skit. Peter was a kind soul, a dreamer. He would never, even if he were single, be so bold as to visually eat up a stranger while spraying great gusts of hormones into the atmosphere.

  Lexie had insinuated herself into Peter’s mind after meeting him at a friend’s wedding. Over the four hours of the reception, she kept one eye on him while trying to act cool, nonchalant, disinterested. In truth, she had felt an intensity toward him that gave her the tunnel vision of a drill. She had known from their mutual friend that Peter was an accomplished musician, a classical guitarist, who had trained as a luthier and had a workshop where he made guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments for world-class musicians, famous and unknown. Lexie had never met anyone who did anything like that. She was impressed.

  Tonight, Lexie thought, Peter would be the beneficiary of the lust being propagated from the neighboring table. Not that her and Peter’s sex life needed any help; they’d been together only a year and a half. In three months they would be married.

  Lexie searched the room for her best friend, Amy Hagan, the school nurse. She found her near the front at one of the other orphan tables (as the teachers privately called them). Amy, who unlike Lexie could sit firm as a turtle through hours-long meetings, was actively listening to Don McClear, her head tilted to one side, her lips parted into a sweet, Southern smile. No matter how much Lexie thought-shouted her name—Amy! Amy! Amy! Amy!—Amy could not be deterred from obedience.

  Lexie turned to the back of the room and caught the wickedly, sly eye of the first friend she’d made at Ruxton, the eighty-year-old English teacher, Dot Harrison. Dot, like Lexie, could barely contain herself in her skin through meetings, lectures, and speeches. In her advanced age, she had grown tired of formalities and intolerant of meaningless obligations. Dot liked to put on her tap shoes and dance at parties. She cursed so much among faculty that Lexie thought it had to be a mild case of Tourette’s.

  With her puckered eyes honed into Lexie’s, Dot lifted her right hand, extended her middle fuck-you finger, and false-casually scratched the barely perceptible wisps of hair on her head. It was a gesture intended to make Lexie laugh, and it did. Silently. She looked away before Dot did something even more outrageous, and then caught the caustic glare of Janet Irwin seated at an Honor Society table. Janet had been at Ruxton for thirty-five years and might as well have been running the place. She lived on campus, had never married, didn’t appear to date or leave the campus for any reason, and never spoke of anything that wasn’t school-related. Janet gave the single, swift nod of her head that never failed to make Lexie feel small, ridiculous, and adolescent. Lexie smiled at her, the smile wasn’t returned, and Lexie looked away.

  Ethan Waite, a senior Lexie had been counseling every Wednesday afternoon, loped across the dining hall. Where had he been all this time? Lexie watched as Ethan took the empty seat beside the wolf-eyed man. So her pursuer was his father. Daniel Waite. Lexie had heard much about Daniel Waite during her three years at Ruxton; he was one of the school’s biggest donors. But because she didn’t deal with that stuff—the schmoozing, the check collecting—Lexie had never before seen this particular famous alumnus. Lexie assumed that the texting woman seated on the other side of Ethan was Mrs. Waite.

  As far as she knew from her sessions with Ethan, his parents were married. Married. Something she would be, soon enough, if she could only work out the final details of the wedding. Lexie needed chairs. Seventeen elegant chairs for the seventeen musicians who were to play at her December 12 wedding. Lexie examined the old-fashioned wooden chairs beside her . . . nah, too schoolroom-l
ooking.

  Lexie flicked her eyes over to Mr. Waite and damn if he wasn’t still staring straight at her. She startled a bit and he laughed and winked. She quiet-laughed, too. Was this flirting? Was she actually flirting with this probably-married man? Since the day she first met Peter, Lexie hadn’t flirted with anyone. The romance had been so easy, so fun, that she had ceased to think about, or even notice, any of the other attractive people in the world. Lexie had been so convinced of the perfection of their pairing that she moved in with Peter after only five weeks of dating. Sometimes Lexie stood in the center of his cottagey two-bedroom house (her house, once they were married), thought of Peter, and wondered how she was so lucky that she had ended up here.

  When she was a kid living on the second floor of a rickety apartment building with open-air hallways in San Leandro, California, Lexie had never dreamed she’d have the life she had now. After school, she often sat on the living room couch, avoiding the tiny craters left by her father’s fallen cigarettes, and flip through catalogues, imagining that the rooms she saw were rooms she lived in. That the people she saw were people she knew. That the life they appeared to be living was her life. It seemed impossible that anyone could exist in a world that tidy, organized, and lovely.

  Don McClear’s speech had come to an end. People clapped and shifted in their seats. Many of the parents pulled out their cell phones; chins and necks accordianed inward, shoulders slumped toward tiny screens. Lexie tried to ignore the married Mr. Waite. Why even make eyes at someone like that when what she had already was so beautifully ideal. Who wanted anything to do with a man who was sleazy enough to flirt while his wife sat right beside him? Lexie took the salad she hadn’t eaten and slid it to Magnus who was known on campus as the Human Garbage Disposal. She refused to look at Mr. Waite again.

  Until an hour and a half later when he stopped her on the great lawn. It was seconds after the sun had dipped below the horizon and everything was cast with a sumptuous orangey light.