Mother May I(69)

Marshall’s phone sent me to voice mail, so I sat down at the desk and emailed him. It felt good to write the whole thing out. It took almost an hour, and that was good, too. Typing it, seeing the story unspool in black and white, made it feel a little truer. At the same time, it felt strange to be talking to another man, even Marshall, so intimately about my husband and his failings.

Every time I paused to think, my eyes were drawn to Trey’s own picture from his frat days, still sitting on the bookshelf. He was so young. In this shot no pledges were lined up on the lawn in front of him. Ansel/Adam had yet to rush. Lexie Pine had not crossed his path. She was probably unpacking her thrift-store jeans into her dorm’s dresser, nervously rechecking her class schedule, meeting her roommate.

In my head the roommate was a lot like Trey’s sister, a Vanderbilt grad who was cool and kind and distant with me. I even pictured them the same, blondes with bright, white, straightened smiles and too many shoes for a dorm closet. She would have a new bedspread and framed posters and a fancy coffeemaker and a mini-fridge. I added a pretty mother, much like my own mother-in-law, wearing one of her million lightweight silk sweater sets, helping her child arrange throw pillows and her old pink bear from home.

I was probably close. This was UVA in the nineties after all. What would this girl and her family have made of Lexie? She was not the roomie they’d expected.

I read my email over twice before I hit send, making sure the story I’d laid out for Marshall was as close as I could come to re-creating Trey’s. I was glad to see I hadn’t wasted lines defending my husband or making excuses for him. I was equally relieved to see I hadn’t typed “Trey said” or, worse, “According to Trey” too many times. I’d written it plain, as if I believed it. That must mean I did. I hoped I did.

Growing up the way I had, both the story and the way he’d described Lexie, her behavior at that posh university, made sense to me. She must have felt how I had when I visited the UGA campus over in Athens. My scholarship would have paid my tuition at any in-state school that accepted me, and UGA had the most prestigious theatre program. I’d gone for a campus tour that included a dorm stay and a student guide.

They’d paired me with a sorority girl who drove me around campus in her brand-new VW Bug convertible. She had a Lowcountry accent and perfect teeth, and she assumed I’d rather go with her to a local Italian place than eat the free sandwiches at the meet-and-greet.

I ordered a side salad and water and white-knuckled it, my hand in my purse, fisted around Betsy’s invisible, no-limit Visa, giving the rich girl her own accent and inflections back. It was pure performance, and she bought it enough to push me to rush, swearing I was sure to get a bid. The whole thing left me exhausted. I’d chosen Georgia State, grittier and grungier and smaller. Betsy’s first choice, too. UVA was upscale and elite. I understood, in ways my husband at twenty-one years old could not have, how this one event could ruin a girl like Lexie. She’d had no safety net, no backup opportunities. It was awful what had happened to her, and my husband’s part in it wasn’t pretty.

But it also did not make him Spencer Shaw.

I hoped Marshall would agree. He knew Trey pretty well from work, plus they’d been thrown together quite a bit socially back when Betsy was alive. But Marshall had a cop mind, naturally suspicious. I wondered if he would ask the same question that was plaguing me.

Why had Trey never told me this, not any of it, before?

Perhaps he’d hinted at it.

“I was such an ass in college,” he’d said more than once, shaking his head. Rueful, but also, I thought, fond.

I stared at the picture, at my husband’s boyish, smiling face. I wanted to meet that young Trey. I wanted him to tell me the story, in his own words, fresh. My husband described his younger self as “a typical frat boy,” yet I hoped to God that what had happened to Lexie Pine was anything but typical.

Why had he never told me?

When Trey and I started dating, he didn’t earnestly detail his long-past college years, just as I didn’t breathlessly tell him all about my time in middle school. We’d talked much more about current things. Of course we discussed our childhoods, our families, our romantic histories, like any new couple getting serious. On his part, his marriage and divorce had loomed largest in our conversations. My own sexual history was recent and short and bland.

Trey was the first man to ever be devoted to my pleasure. His own seemed tied to it. Ladies first, and often ladies again. Before him I’d had only two serious boyfriends, so I had no war stories per se. But I’d talked to him about Betsy’s wild year, told him Crazy Betsy stories in the same way he’d told me a few Crazy Spencer tales. Surely he’d had openings to bring up Lexie Pine?

I’d even told him about the time Betsy frenched a girl, freshman year. She’d come whirling into our dorm room, bright-eyed and bursting with story. I’d closed my books to listen. It sounded like more than a kiss, actually. A mini-make-out session with pretty, petite Dai-tai from algebra.

“Do you like her?” I’d asked. “Does she like you?”

“Not like-like, either one of us. It was more of an experiment,” she’d said. “But her boyfriend kept scooting closer and closer. I got creeped out and bounced.”

I’d been horrified. “Her boyfriend was there? What if he hadn’t let you leave?”