The Trouble with Lexie Read online

  Daniel was waiting for her at the same table they’d had the other two times they’d been there. He stood, walked to Lexie, and hugged her so tightly she could feel his body heat through his dress shirt.

  “You okay?” Daniel pulled back, held Lexie by the shoulders and stared at her.

  “Yeah, I think I am.” Lexie willed herself to think of Dot so that her mouth would close and her face would convey the appropriate emotion.

  “Who died?”

  “Uh . . .” She realized Daniel probably knew Dot. Had likely known her for years. While Lexie and Daniel were intimate enough to have sex, she didn’t feel close enough to him, yet, for her to comfort him over a death. She had no idea how he’d react. Or how she should react to his reaction. If he cried, was she supposed to hug him and rub his back? Or was she supposed to patiently and dispassionately wait through it as she did when students cried in her office?

  “I have a room tonight. Should we go there and talk?” Daniel lowered his head so it was even with Lexie’s. He appeared to be examining her as if to make sure she wasn’t going to collapse on the floor wailing.

  “Yes.” Again, Lexie saw Daniel flipping her, naked, from her back to her front. What was wrong with her that her mind jumped straight to sex when she was minutes from telling Daniel of Dot’s death?

  “We can get Frito pie delivered.” Daniel cupped Lexie’s elbow and escorted her out of the restaurant and into the lobby of the inn. While they waited for the elevator, Daniel leaned in and kissed Lexie. Gently. Like a whisper.

  They kissed again inside the elevator. This time it was more intense. A real kiss. They kissed in the hallway outside the elevator; the hallway outside the door to the room; inside the room on the other side of the door; next to the bed; on the bed; and, finally, in the bed. Amy had once taken Lexie around the Ruxton chapel and explained the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The kiss parade felt the same: stops on a journey to a divine end.

  An hour later, Lexie and Daniel were naked, lying side by side, holding hands like a cutout paper train of people. They turned their heads toward each other at the same time and laughed, although there wasn’t anything to laugh at.

  “I’m ordering food.” Daniel rolled over and picked up the phone on the night table. From the back, undressed, if you didn’t look at the pencil scratches of gray in his hair, he didn’t look much older than Peter. Lexie propped herself up on her elbows and examined her belly, which the past couple of years had been rounding in spite of her weighing the same she always had. It wasn’t fair the way men’s bodies barely shifted with age.

  “Will you get me ice cream or a milkshake?” Lexie pushed her fist into her belly, sucked it in.

  “No Frito pie?” Daniel covered the mouthpiece with his massive hand like he was a pitcher holding a baseball.

  “No. I want something cold. And something chocolate.” What she truly wanted was something sweet and indulgent. She was at once completely relaxed and high from the sex, and also wound up, contracted, ready to explode. She needed something to balance the two: sugar and fat. Currently, the only two food groups from which she would eat.

  Daniel placed the order. He sat back against the headboard. “So . . .”

  Lexie pulled the sheet under her armpits and sat upright beside him. “Dot died.”

  “Dot?” Daniel squinted his eyes into two wide slits. The named didn’t appear to trigger any memories.

  “She was an English teacher. I thought you might know her from . . . I don’t know, from all the fund-raisers and things you do with the school.” As she said this, Lexie remembered Dot saying that she’d rather go to a “fucking herpes convention” than sit through any fund-raiser for Ruxton.

  “Is that a real name? Dot? Like, does she have a twin brother named Dash?”

  Lexie laughed. And then she groaned. “I can’t believe I’m laughing at Dot’s name. She was my friend. I loved her!” She gave Daniel a playful slap on the arm.

  “How old was she?”

  “Eighty.”

  “Wait. Are you talking about Mrs. Harrison?”

  “Yes! Dot Harrison. Her real name was Dorothy. She was born Dorothy May Tavis.” Saying the name made Lexie gasp for breath. She looked at Daniel, and all was okay again.

  “Yeah, she and her husband were my dorm parents. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. They were sweet.”

  “Not sure I’d call her sweet.”

  “Maybe not.” Daniel turned his head toward Lexie. “She used to sing in class. And she had that crazy voice—like someone who’d smoked unfiltered cigarettes since the age of five. Oh! And she’d tap-dance, too.”

  “She tapped something from Forty-Second Street last night. Then she felt dizzy, so she lay on her sister’s bed and never got up again.”

  “Great way to go. . . . Are you sure she was eighty? I mean, I knew her thirty-five years ago and I thought she was eighty then.”

  “The students probably look at me and think I’m eighty.” Lexie was relieved Daniel wasn’t crying, or going into some soulful daze like what had overcome Peter the day his former guitar teacher, a man he called Spondee, died.

  “You?” Daniel yanked the sheet off Lexie and then repositioned himself so that he could kiss her soft middle. “They probably think Janet Irwin is eighty. But you . . .” With one hand on each of Lexie’s shark-fin hip bones, Daniel kissed his way down to her pubic mound. He looked up at her and said, “I bet those boys are wacking off every single night while thinking about you.”

  Lexie shook her head. “That is totally and completely disgusting to even imagine.” She tugged Daniel up. He pressed himself against Lexie and she turned so that he was shelled around her back, his arm dangling across her belly, which she reflexively sucked in. Lexie wondered if the Ruxton boys ever did have a crush on her. You couldn’t tell. Most of them were usually a little flustered and nervously attentive. Except Ethan. He was as comfortable with Lexie as if she were his aunt. She doubted he had a crush on her. Lexie put her hand on top of Daniel’s and tried to suck in further. She held her belly like that. Barely breathing. Until she fell asleep.

  There was a knock on the door. Lexie opened her eyes. It took a second to remember where she was and who was behind her. Daniel unstuck himself from Lexie and rolled off the bed. Lexie pulled the sheet up to her eyes. She was hiding, or mostly hiding, even though there was no chance she knew anyone who worked at the inn (and by the end of the night she would be a single woman). But it was late afternoon and they were naked—to have anyone enter the room was to announce that they’d had sex.

  Daniel went into the bathroom. Seconds later, he emerged wearing the hotel’s white, waffle-weave robe. He opened the door and let the uniformed, bald man roll in a cart with a thick, white tablecloth and two silver-lidded platters. Lexie’s eyes darted from Daniel to the man, who politely looked at the floor as he waited for Daniel to sign the check. Daniel wrote his name so quickly, Lexie imagined his signature couldn’t have been much more than a straight line. The uniformed man nodded his head, said thank you, and quickly left. Daniel rolled the cart closer to the bed.

  Lexie sat up, pulling the sheet with her. Daniel sat on the edge of the bed, facing her. “While you were sleeping, I remembered something that happened with Mrs. Harrison when I was a student.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lexie pulled the silver lids off both platters. She picked up the bowl of three perfectly round scoops of chocolate ice cream and slid in the silver spoon. Then she readjusted the sheet again, pulling it tighter under her armpits. Light streamed in through the sheer curtains. Lexie felt too illuminated to sit naked while eating ice cream.

  “For some reason I had stopped in at her apartment in Rilke one night before homecoming and she pointed at my chest and said ‘Take that shirt off and let me iron it! You’re not going out looking like a hobo who stepped off the rails!’” Daniel did a good approximation of Dot’s voice. It brought forth the quiverings of a cry in Lexie’s throat. She shoved a giant spoonful of ice cream into
her mouth and swirled it around without swallowing. As she focused on the cold, velvety ice cream, the urge to cry fizzled out.

  “So, I agreed to stay in Dot’s place, in Rilke.” Lexie dug her spoon into the bowl again.

  “And they’ll let your fiancé live there with you before you’re married?” Daniel took a bite of Frito pie.

  “No. I’m leaving him. I’m calling off the wedding.” Lexie casually flipped the ice cream balls over with her spoon so she could get to the melty, soft bottoms. She didn’t want to look at Daniel for fear she’d be disappointed by his reaction.

  “That’s fantastic.”

  Lexie finally looked up. Daniel had paused with a spoonful of Frito pie hovering in the air. The edges of his mouth were creeping into a grin. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long, long time.” He shoved the Frito pie into his mouth and chewed with his mouth shut while smiling. The crunching sounded like boots walking on gravel. “How’d your fiancé take the news?” He took another big bite of Frito pie.

  “I haven’t told him yet.” This gave Lexie a jolty feeling that smoothed out when she took an enormous bite of ice cream. If Daniel hadn’t been there, she would have leaned over the bowl and sucked in an entire chocolate ball—choked herself with it.

  “Are you going to tell him about us?” Daniel looked like a man at an awards ceremony who wasn’t quite sure if the emcee had announced his name as the winner or not. Half happy, half anxious.

  “I hadn’t planned to.” Why was he asking this? Wasn’t he officially separated? The confidence she’d felt seconds ago was suctioned out of Lexie like dust up a vacuum hose.

  “Tell him after Jen and I are out of the closet with this separation.” Daniel stirred the Frito pie. “Tell him when Ethan graduates.” He was relaxed. And he appeared undeniably happy that Lexie was leaving Peter. Confidence flitted around her—particles that hadn’t yet coalesced.

  “So, you think we’ll be seeing each other eight months from now when Ethan graduates?” Lexie needed more confirmation. She wanted Daniel to answer quickly, before her brain filled in the silence with every crazy, heartbreaking scenario: Daniel no longer wanted to see her now that she was available. Daniel was using her for sex. Daniel liked the challenge of fucking his son’s counselor. The bad possibilities were limitless.

  “If it were my choice, you’d be my official girlfriend starting right this second.” Daniel leaned his head down and looked into Lexie’s face. “But maybe you need to figure out how you feel about me.”

  After weeks of trying to ignore her feelings for Daniel Waite, Lexie felt free to look openly and directly at her heart. She was in love. Undeniably and completely. And now that she could admit these feelings (if only to herself) she was seeing their first encounter, on the lawn at Ruxton, through a different lens. True love had been there from the start, Lexie decided. Exactly as it had been with the three other men she’d loved in her life. (With each one she’d immediately felt a blood-rushing intoxication. She had never gotten to know someone better and then realized that he was the one.)

  “Tell me this—” Lexie said. “To whom, other than me, are you actually going to say the word girlfriend if you’re not out with the separation?” If she was going to be his girlfriend, the breakup with Peter would be permanent. No delicate easing out. No taking it through palatable stages. She’d have to stay in Dot’s place until she . . . moved in with Daniel?

  “I might tell a couple of my close friends. And I’d definitely tell my brother.” Daniel talked about his brother more than he talked about Ethan. He was immensely proud of his younger sib, a Silicon Valley hotshot.

  Lexie swirled the remainder of the ice cream into an icy pudding. “Hmmm, I’ll agree to be your girlfriend if you pass a three-question test.”

  “Do I have to get all three right?” Daniel was grinning.

  “Yes.” Lexie had no idea what the questions were. She’d make them up as she went along.

  “Yes? Shit. You’re hard.”

  “Question one.” Lexie spoke in the stilted announcement voice Don McClear used when he approached the microphone in the dining hall or the auditorium. “Have you ever named your penis?” She licked a dollop of ice cream off her spoon.

  Daniel nodded toward where the named or unnamed object resided. He looked at Lexie and said, firmly, “No.”

  “Correct!” Amy had advised Lexie long ago to never get involved with a man who referred to himself in the third person and to never, ever, sleep with anyone who had named his dick. (Amy had once ended a date midcoitus when she discovered that the guy had named his dick Carbuncle.)

  “Question two.” Lexie took another mouthful of ice cream. She swirled it in her mouth while she thought up the question. “Have you ever cheated on a girlfriend or wife?”

  “No.” This answer came out quickly, with an upswing in tone as if it were an impossibility.

  “Correct!” Mitzy once told Lexie a story about a Dear Abby column. A reader wrote in to say that it wasn’t true that men never left their wives for their mistresses because her lover had left his wife and had married her. Abby replied something along the lines of Congratulations! You’re married to someone who cheats on his wife! At the time, Lexie wondered if Mitzy was trying to tell her that she had stolen Bert from another woman, a wife, perhaps. But she didn’t ask. No need to learn more than what Lexie already knew.

  “Okay, question three.” Lexie put the ice cream bowl on the cart and pushed the cart away from the bed. “Do you want to have sex one more time before I run out of here for dinner duty?”

  “Yes, but I’m fifty-three. Even a girl as amazing and beautiful as you can’t bring this”— Daniel pointed at his crotch with his thick, square hand—“this never, ever, ever been named and never-ever-ever-cheated-on-anyone dick back to life only an hour after orgasm.”

  Lexie wanted to laugh but she knew, from Amy mostly, that it was unwise to laugh when a man was discussing his penis. “You pass!” Lexie said. “I fully accept the position of girlfriend!”

  “And I am the winner.” Daniel leaned back against the headboard and Lexie curled into his chest where the robe was gaping open. “Hey, Peter’s not violent, is he?”

  “No, not at all.” The small, wiry hairs on Daniel’s chest tickled Lexie’s face. When she pushed into him the hair felt spongy and aerated. This was a new sensation. She’d never been with a man whose chest was filled in with fur.

  “He’s not going to try to hurt you when you tell him you’re leaving?”

  “No! He makes guitars.” Lexie looked up at Daniel.

  “If I were him, I’d want to kill someone. You sure he’s not going to El Kabong you?”

  “Huh?”

  “It was this cartoon when I was kid. This guy, I think he was Spanish or Mexican—wait, he may have been a Mexican dog . . . or no, he was a horse. Anyway, he played guitar and when he got mad he’d lift the guitar and smash it on people’s heads and yell ‘El Kabong!’ ”

  “I can’t imagine Peter causing harm to any of his guitars.” Lexie wanted to burrow into Daniel’s chest and hibernate—his hair as a blanket over her body—until the Peter breakup had passed.

  “Yeah, but a broken heart can make people a little crazy. You know, make them act out in ways that even they themselves would never have imagined.”

  “Half the problem with Peter is there’s nothing about him that challenges the imagination,” Lexie said with certainty. “I’ll never be surprised by him.”

  12

  PETER WAS WAITING WITH A COFFEE CUP WHEN LEXIE WALKED IN the house. He hugged her, the drink in his hand hot against her back, and rocked her in his arms as if he were mothering a child.

  “I’m okay.” Lexie pulled away from the hug. She took the drink, gulped down a mouthful, and then jerked her head back and coughed. It was Irish coffee. And stronger than she would have made it. But probably a good thing considering what she had to accomplish tonight. She took another couple glugs before handing the cup
to Peter who slurped from the top as if it were too hot to swallow (it wasn’t).

  “Yeah?” Peter brushed the hair from Lexie’s face. “Are you ready to talk about . . . your shitty day?”

  The whiskey in the coffee gave Lexie a cottony feeling in her head. But it wasn’t enough to provide the courage needed to break up with Peter. Why hadn’t anyone started a business where you could hire a surrogate to do the hard things that should be done face-to-face: breakups, quitting jobs, asking for money owed, telling someone they’d disappointed you? After growing up in a household where conflict was the central interaction, Lexie was so averse to confrontation that she regularly accepted the normally unacceptable (being overcharged in a restaurant, Janet Irwin’s petty demands, a student complaining about a grade, etc.). Lexie took the cup from Peter and sipped down as much as she could before he removed it from her hands.

  “I’ll be ready in a second.” She felt the alcohol like an elevator rising into her cottony skull.

  “Did she ever answer your grandmother-of-the-bride email?” Peter finished off the coffee. Maybe to keep Lexie from sucking it down so quickly.

  “No. I hope she read it, though.” Lexie stared at Peter. How awful would it be if she did this by text? Beyond reproach, she knew.

  “I bet she did. She probably was going to say yes in person.”

  “Will you talk to me in the bedroom while I pack?” Lexie walked upstairs ahead of Peter. Maybe she could put off the conversation until after she’d packed her bag.

  Peter sat on the bed, watching while Lexie filled her rolling bag. Next, she got the big, ancient suitcase from the hall closet, the one she’d used when she’d moved from California to the East Coast.

  “How many nights do you have to stay?” Peter lay back, his arms crossed behind his head.

  “Hmmmm, not sure.” Lexie felt like vomiting. Was it possible to load everything into the car and then tell Peter seconds before she drove away? It would serve the face-to-face obligation while saving her the agony of discussion. More than anything, Lexie didn’t want to see Peter’s reaction when she told him it was over. She didn’t want to feel his feelings.