Mating Calls Read online

  “How’s your night been?” Ethan asked. Lexie liked that he was curious about her. Daniel claimed Ethan never told him anything about his sessions with Lexie, although she wished that weren’t true. Sometimes the father and the son merged in her experiences with them—fucking Daniel, she could open her eyes and see Ethan right there in front of her; talking to Ethan, she could shut her eyes and feel Daniel in the room.

  “My night’s been bizarre,” Lexie said to Ethan. “Shouldn’t you boys be back in the dorms by now?”

  Connor put his finger up to his puffy lips and did a shhhh sound. Lexie wondered if he was so drunk he didn’t know who he was shushing.

  “We thought we saw a fox,” Ethan said, “and just went out to investigate.”

  “Of course.” Lexie winked at Ethan and then teetered away.

  Lexie was grateful for the first floor apartment; stairs would have been tricky. All faculty members were in first-floor quarters, as if that would help them see who was sneaking in and out. She was in Richwand House, the freshman dorm. While the students above her slept in single beds, two or three to a room, she lived in comparative luxury—a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen window that looked out to a rolling lawn and the pond. The furniture and even the pictures on the walls belonged to the school, but that was just as well. Lexie’s fiancé, Jeff, had kept everything they had accumulated. She saw it as payment of sorts for her sudden departure. How do you apologize for an instantaneous change of heart?

  Lexie pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. 2:15 a.m. She clicked through her texts to Daniel and read their last sexy conversation as she worked off her boots. In the bedroom, she dropped her purse on the bed, then lay back and undressed while still managing the phone with her left hand. She was surprised Daniel hadn’t texted to make sure that she’d made it home OK. He always texted when she left him in Boston for the drive back to New Hampshire. Once, when a desperate student showed up at her apartment, Lexie wasn’t able to respond to Daniel’s text for two hours. I’ve been a wreck worrying about you! Daniel had texted, and Lexie’s heart had swelled like a helium balloon.

  Finally, she tossed the phone to the carpet. She would forget about this evening for now, she decided, and then she listed in her head all that she was to forget: the drive to Daniel’s house, the break-in, stealing the Klonopin, and being discovered asleep on the bed.

  “Jesus,” she said aloud, “the vibrator, too.” Lexie sat up and retrieved the vibrator from her purse. She turned it on and pressed the bulb against herself. Immediately, she fell asleep.

  The battery was dead in the morning. Lexie shook the thing, turned it off and on again, but it was silent. She tossed it Frisbee-style across the room, aiming for the wastebasket and missing. Her phone was ringing. Lexie hung over the edge of the bed and stared at the New Hampshire number she didn’t recognize. She hoped it was Daniel calling from someone else’s phone.

  “Mimi there?” a man asked.

  “Huh?” Lexie laughed. She thought it might be Daniel playing games with her.

  “Mimi?”

  “Wait, who is this?”

  “I must have the wrong number,” the man said.

  “Daniel?” Lexie asked, startling herself with the urgency in her voice.

  “I’ve got the wrong number,” the man said, and he hung up.

  Lexie texted Daniel. Shit hitting the fan in the office here. Need some advice—call now! She was programmed in Daniel’s phone as Jake, a fictional paralegal. Messages were always subtext and innuendo until Daniel let her know that he was free for discourse, or to receive Lexie’s abundant texts and carefully posed naked photos. More than once, she’d thought about how great her life would be if she were actually the girl she appeared to be in texts—infinitely alluring, always well-lit, witty, and snappy.

  After 20 minutes, Daniel had not replied. Maybe the subtext was too grabby and demanding. Lexie texted again. Whenever you get around to it is fine, dude. We’re cool. She waited five more minutes for a reply, and then she took a shower with the phone on the hallway floor just outside the bathroom door.

  Daniel didn’t call or text all weekend. They’d never gone 24 hours without some contact. Lexie felt as if she were holding her breath, or maybe standing on the edge of a cliff. It was his anniversary weekend, she reminded herself over and over again. There was probably forced togetherness, unlike all other weekends of the year. But these rationalizations didn’t calm her for long, especially when Lexie remembered the hard eyes that looked at her when she had been discovered on the bed.

  Other than her regular meal duties (during which she was assigned to a dining table for the purpose of engaging students in stimulating conversation), Lexie passed the weekend rolling her worries around her head and sending texts from “Jake.” Four times, she stepped into the shower and cried with the water running so no one could hear her through the walls.

  By Monday morning, lecturing to her human sexuality class, Lexie felt as empty and thin as a used plastic bag. In spite of the subject matter, this was not a class that was going to distract her enough to pull her out of her clingy interior. Even without the current crisis, she was utterly bored with talking to kids about sex. And the students were bored, too. They were so sophisticated these days that even a condom rolled over a banana barely elicited a chuckle.

  After class, Lexie went to her office, sat at the desk, and stared at a heap of papers. There were 15 two-page essays on STDs to read, a letter of recommendation to write, and ridiculous amounts of form-filling to do regarding her student patients. She couldn’t manage any of it.

  She got up and closed the blinds, and instead of lying on the chintz-covered couch or sitting in the giant seashell of the wing chair, she lay on the Persian rug, her head pushed against the leg of the Windsor chair at her desk. As with her apartment, she’d inherited the office already decorated, everything looking like it came from the set of an ’80s movie about prep schools and rich kids and a life that few people actually knew firsthand. Lexie shut her eyes and counted backward from 1,000. The plan was to not think about Daniel, to not cry over Daniel (God, what joy would it bring her to hear that Daniel had cried over her!), to count continuously until Ethan Waite showed up for his 11 a.m. appointment, at which point she would stealthily grill him on his father’s whereabouts.

  At 10:30, she had done very little counting and a great deal of crying, so she got up, reached into the zipper pocket of her purse, and took exactly one of the Klonopins she had swiped from Jen Waite’s medicine cabinet. Before she could lie down again, she went back to her purse and took exactly one and a half more Klonopin. The initial response was psychosomatic, Lexie knew: a flooding warmth that descended from her sinuses to her feet, transforming her from a tangled mass of wires into a watery blob. By the time Ethan Waite knocked on the door, Lexie was boneless.

  “Come on in,” Lexie shouted, since she didn’t have it in her to get up and open the door.

  Ethan didn’t seem to register—or care—that Lexie was on the floor.

  “Can I have the chair today?” Ethan asked, and he flopped down, all long legs and bulky arms. His flat chest-to-crotch expansion reminded Lexie of a widened miniature ironing board. Like his son, Daniel was flat across the front, but he wasn’t as solid as Ethan looked—more memory foam than steel.

  “Whatever you want,” Lexie said, staring up at him. “I’m down here because I tweaked my back in a Pilates class,” she lied. The ghost of Daniel outlined Ethan like an aura. Lexie’s emotions seesawed from grief over Daniel’s silence to joy at being alone with her favorite student, only chromosomes away from Daniel. She was glad the blinds were shut and the overhead light off. She didn’t want Ethan to see the bluish cast around her eyes or her rashy-red nostrils.

  “So I heard you had a little run-in with some Ambien, and you broke into my parents’ house and took a nap.” Ethan’s laugh was so big his mouth looked like some fresh pink sea cave.

  “Weird, huh?” Lexie s
at up, leaned against the bottom of the couch, and tucked her feet under her behind. “Did your dad tell you about it?” Had Daniel called Ethan this weekend, or was his phone suddenly broken or disconnected?

  “No, my mom did. She was so pissed at my dad for leaving the door unlocked,” Ethan said. Lexie smiled at the thought of Daniel protecting her lie. Protecting her. And then, within the time it took to smile, she realized that if Daniel had said he forgot to lock the door, he was probably just protecting himself.

  “Does he often leave the door open?” Lexie asked.

  “We all leave the door open. I don’t even have a key.”

  “You know, it’s always the people with the big houses who have a lot of good stuff to steal who leave their doors unlocked. Did you ever notice that?” Lexie was sinking and spreading. Her floppy emptiness filled with the weight of Klonopin. “It’s the guy with a mobile home parked in a swamp full of cattails, who owns nothing but a frying pan and a tub of Crisco, who always triple-locks his door.”

  “Hell yeah,” Ethan said. “That’s New Hampshire for you.”

  “So, what did your mother say?” Lexie couldn’t help asking, trying to center her wobbling-top brain.

  “Seriously, she can’t shut up about it. You’d think it was the craziest thing that’s ever happened in her life. I swear, she even called her sister in Zurich and told her about it.”

  “Oh, wow.” Who cared about the sister in Zurich! “And what did your dad say?” This, of course, was all she really wanted to know.

  “I dunno, he didn’t say much except that he might bring a class-action suit against Ambien. I guess a lot of people are taking it and waking up in strange houses.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly not much.”

  “Yeah, it is. My dad sues people for a living. To say that he’s going to sue someone is like saying he’s going to breathe.”

  Lexie found herself smiling again. Wouldn’t she have to work with Daniel on this lawsuit? Would she be the plaintiff? Lexie imagined herself dressed like a character from an Aaron Sorkin TV show, in a conservative but sexy pantsuit, as she and Daniel met in closed quarters to discuss the case.

  Ethan shrugged, then lifted his right arm, dangling his hand behind his head. A muscle popped out like a giant grapefruit tucked under his skin. Ethan often flashed his muscles in Lexie’s office, and she’d wondered if he had sensed her crush on him and was deliberately peacocking. “I suppose I was the first person who’s Ambien-walked into the house of a lawyer.” Lexie laughed, her Klonopin tongue flapping against the roof of her mouth.

  “Hell yeah,” Ethan said. “That is so fucking funny for me to think of you on my parents’ bed.”

  “Yeah,” Lexie felt her tongue fatten. She focused on enunciating her words. “Beds and bedrooms are particularly symbolic places.…” Lexie drifted off, unsure of what she had intended to say.

  “So do you think it meant something that that was the place where you passed out?” Ethan jerked his head back.

  “Well, I don’t think it meant anything to me, except that I was tired. I did take a sleeping pill, after all.” Lexie shrugged. Borders were dissolving; she had no framework with which she could contain herself. And no framework with which she could contain Ethan or the idea of Ethan—everything was merging: Ethan, Daniel, Lexie, Jen.

  “Wait. Are you saying their bed is symbolic for me?” Ethan thumped his chest with his fist.

  “Well, you did say it was funny that I was on their bed.” Grief flared across Lexie’s skin, then died down again.

  “But you were on their bed,“ Ethan said, “I didn’t say that so I could talk about what my parents’ bed might symbolize.”

  “Do you want to talk about the symbolic power of your parents’ bed?” Lexie asked. She was fairly sure what she said didn’t quite follow what Ethan had said, but she wanted more than the usual from Ethan Waite. Why hadn’t Daniel called her? Why did Jen have a vibrator?

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Ethan said, laughing. “I don’t like thinking about what my parents may or may not do in their bed.”

  Lexie wanted to roll her eyes. With all their overt knowingness about sex, teenagers could be such prudes. “You know everyone’s parents have sex at least once. Even yours.” Lexie held on to the faith that her drugged face appeared vaguely uninterested in Jen and Daniel’s sex life.

  “Yeah, I get that.” Ethan paused. “And I think my parents have done it a hell of a lot more than once, because sometimes they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. But I still don’t want to talk about it.”

  “They can’t keep their hands of each other?!” Lexie’s voice skidded but Ethan didn’t seem to pick up on it.

  “Why are we stuck on this?” Ethan asked.

  “You brought it up.” Lexie tried to modulate her voice into midrange professional. “You were fascinated with the fact that I was on the matrimonial bed.” At this point in her Klonopin stupor, the word matrimonial felt like an intellectual triumph.

  “The matrimonial bed.” Ethan sighed, leaning back in the chair. He was giving in. “Well, I’m sure my dad feels like he supports my mom, so he’s gotta get something going on in the matrimonial bed, right?” Ethan blushed and smiled.

  Lexie felt herself go silent. She slumped onto the floor and lay down again. She no longer wanted to be Ethan Waite’s therapist. She no longer wanted to hear about Jen and Daniel’s sex life. She wanted to disappear. Cut open her flesh and let her watery self saturate the carpet.

  “Sorry,” Ethan said. “That was kind of sexist, wasn’t it? Falling into the gender binary again.”

  “I’m living in the gender binary,” Lexie slurred. “I was raised in the gender binary. It’s a reality, if not the ideal one.” If being the mistress (former mistress?!) to a powerful, older, married man wasn’t within the gender binary, what was?

  Ethan shifted in his seat, and something large and shiny slipped out of his back pocket.

  “What’s that?” Lexie could barely cough out her words. Whas tha?

  “Nothing.” Ethan tucked it back into his pocket.

  “It was something. What is it?” Focusing on anything other than Daniel was a form of relief.

  “It’s a flask.” Ethan pulled it out and held it up for Lexie to see.

  “Why do you have that at school?” School sounded more like skull. Lexie wanted to slap her own face, bring some blood up to the fattened numb spots.

  “Because my dad went to Harvard. Also because today’s Senior Booze Day,” Ethan said. “All the seniors are carrying flasks and drinking all day. Everyone you see, every senior, is wasted.”

  “What?” Was she too flattened-out to follow the thread? “Why did you bring up your dad and Harvard?” The fire of heartache was jumping around Lexie’s body. She wanted to pat herself down, or roll up in the carpet, to put out the enveloping flames.

  “Because I’m only going to Middlebury.” Ethan continued to hold up the flask as if they were toasting.

  “Middlebury’s fabulous.” Faboolous. “We’ve discussed this already. And you shouldn’t carry alcohol on campus.”

  “You shouldn’t eat Ambien and crash on the matrimonial bed,” Ethan said, smiling.

  “Give it here,” Lexie stuck out her hand as if they were in a TV room together and she had asked for the remote.

  Ethan stood, then lowered himself to the floor next to Lexie’s head and handed her the flask. She tucked it beneath her lower back, confiscating it.

  “Guys don’t normally sit on floors.” Lexie desperately needed to float in the present, to keep away from the searing flames of grief. “Have you ever noticed that? Have you noticed how if there are limited chairs in a room, girls will always sit on the floor. As if they don’t deserve the seat?”

  “Gender binary,” Ethan said, “but I’ll always sit on a floor.” He wiggled a little as if to settle in. Lexie wondered if he had any idea how much power he held in his youthful perfection. Ethan was bette
r than Daniel, she decided. He’d never let a drugged girl drive herself home. He’d never go a whole weekend without calling the girl to make sure she was OK. Ethan’s heart was as pure and earnest as a monk’s.

  “Most men I know wouldn’t sit on a floor,” Lexie said.

  “There is no way on earth my dad would sit on a floor,” Ethan said, and Lexie silently agreed.

  “Yoga guys will sit on floors,” Lexie said. “And those guys who wear those hemp wrap things and carry babies—those guys might sit on the floor, but often those guys are sort of bully assholes in disguise. They’ll wear that hempy wrap thing to the farmers’ market, but as soon as they get home, they won’t even unpack the bag and wash the fruit or change a diaper or anything.” She was riffing, but it didn’t seem like such a misstep now that she knew Ethan was drunk. He probably hadn’t noticed her own slurred words and droopy eyes.

  “Yeah, I bet you’re right,” Ethan said.

  “Why do I always end up with the gender binary guys?” Lexie said. “The ones who wouldn’t even realize that all the women are sitting on the floor.” Lexie held Ethan’s gaze and imagined him all grown up and never acting dickish like his father.

  “Should we have some?” Ethan pointed to the flask jutting out from Lexie’s lower back.

  “What is it?”

  “Jägermeister.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll fuck you up,” Lexie said, as if that weren’t already her current condition.

  “I know, but it’s one day. Senior Booze Day. You’re supposed to be fucked up.”

  “You’re supposed to be fucked up. I’m supposed to be a teacher. Or a counselor. Or something like that.” Lexie laughed and Ethan laughed, too. He slid his hand along her hip and took the flask. Lexie could feel an echo of heat radiating into her skin where his fingers had been. Ethan took a sip before Lexie could even think to stop him. When he handed her the flask, it seemed too late to assert her position—besides, her responsible self was so fully dissolved by the Klonopin that only a primitive version remained: brokenhearted, horny with rage and anguish, and consumed with a desire for revenge against the father of this untarnished boy. She pushed herself up onto an elbow, put the flask to her mouth, and took one long pull that burned in her throat.