“Excuse me, Mr. Reed,” his assistant said from just beyond the doorway. “They’re waiting for you and Mrs. Matherly-Reed in the conference room.”
“We’re coming.” Onc
e his assistant had withdrawn, he turned back to Maris. “Duty calls.”
“Always.”
“Forgive me?”
“Always.”
He gave her a hard, quick hug. “You’re the most understanding wife in the history of marriage. Is it any wonder I’m crazy about you?” He kissed her briskly, then nudged her toward the door. “After you, darling.”
“Envy” Ch. 1
Eastern State University, Tennessee, 1985
Members of the fraternity thought it brilliant of their chapter founders to have designed and built their residence house to correlate with the diamond shape of the fraternity crest.
But what they attributed to genius had actually come about by happenstance.
When shopping for a lot on which to build their fraternity house, those thrifty young men in the class of 1910 had purchased the least expensive property available, a deep corner lot a few blocks from campus whose owner was eager to sell. Its appeal was not its shape or location but its price. They acquired it cheaply.
So the lot came first, not the architectural renderings. They designed a structure that would fit on their lot; they didn’t choose a lot that would accommodate their design. After the fact, some members might have noticed that the house was indeed diamond-shaped like their crest, but the similarity was coincidental.
Then, in 1928, a university planning and expansion committee fortuitously decided that the main avenue bisecting the campus should be converted into a landscaped mall open only to pedestrian traffic. They rerouted motor traffic onto the street that passed in front of the unusually shaped chapter house.
Consequently, through no genius of the founders, this location at a key intersection gave the fraternity a commanding presence on campus that was coveted by every other.
The front of the three-story house faced the corner, with wings extending at forty-five-degree angles from either side of it. Between the wings in the rear of the building were a limited and insufficient number of parking spaces, basketball hoops sans baskets, overflowing trash cans, two rusty charcoal grills, and a chain-link-fence dog run that was occupied by Brew, the fraternity’s chocolate Lab mascot.
The building’s facade was much more imposing. The stone path leading up to the entry was lined with Bradford pear trees that blossomed snowy white each year, providing natural decoration for the fraternity’s annual Spring Swing formal.
Photographs of these trees in full bloom frequently appeared on the covers of university catalogues and brochures. This bred resentment in rival fraternities. Whenever threats of chain saws circulated, pledges were ordered to post twenty-four-hour guard. Not only would the fraternity lose face on campus if their trees were cut down, their residence hall would look naked without them.
In autumn the leaves of the Bradford pears turned the vibrant ruby red they were on this particular Saturday afternoon. The campus was uncharacteristically quiet. The football team was playing an away game. Had the team been at home, the front door of the fraternity house would have been open. Music would have been blaring from it. It would be a raucous gathering place for the members, their dates, their parents, and their alums.
Game-day traffic would be backed up for miles, and because every vehicle had to pass through this crossroads to reach the stadium, the members would enjoy a front-row seat for this bumper-to-bumper parade. They’d jeer at the rival team’s fans and flirt with the coeds, who flirted back and sometimes, upon a spontaneous invitation, would leave the vehicles they were in to join the party inside the house. It was documented that several romances, and a few marriages, had originated this way.
On game days, the campus was drenched in crimson. If the school color wasn’t worn, it was waved. Brass and drums from the marching band echoed across campus for hours prior to kickoff. The campus was energized, hopping, festive.
But today it was practically deserted. The weather was rainy and dreary, incompatible with any sort of outdoor activity. Students were using the day to catch up on sleep, study, or laundry—things they didn’t have time to do during the week.
The halls of the fraternity house, smelling dankly of beer and boys, were dim and hushed. A few members were gathered around the large-screen TV that a prosperous alum had donated to the house the year before. It was tuned to an NCAA football game on which money was riding. Occasionally either a cheer or a groan filtered up the staircases to the resident rooms on the second and third floors, but these sounds did little to compromise the sleepy quiet of the corridors.
A quiet that was punctured by, “Roark! You asshole!” followed immediately by a slamming door.
Roark dodged the wet towel hurled at his head and started laughing. “You found it?”
“Whose is it?” Todd Grayson brandished a Styrofoam cup that contained his toothbrush. Which wouldn’t have been remarkable except that the cup had been used as a spittoon. The bristles of Todd’s toothbrush were steeping in the viscous brown fluid in the bottom of the cup.
Roark was reclined on the three-legged sofa beneath their sleeping lofts, which were suspended from the ceiling by short chains. To maximize the small room’s floor space, the lofts had been designed and constructed by the two young men in direct violation and defiance of fraternity house rules against any alteration to the structure of the building.
A couple of stacked bricks served as the sofa’s fourth leg, but the eyesore was the focal point of their habitat, the “nucleus of our cell,” Todd had intoned one night when he was particularly drunk. When furnishing their room, they’d found the atrocity in a junk store and bought it for ten bucks apiece. The upholstery was ripped and ratty and stained by substances that remained unidentified. The sofa had become so integral to the overall ugliness of their room, they had decided to leave it there upon their graduation as a legacy for the room’s next occupants.
But Todd, who had once waxed poetic about the sofa, was so angry now that every muscle in his body was quivering. “Tell me. Whose spit cup is this?”
Roark was clutching his middle, laughing. “You don’t want to know.”