Barefoot (13 page)

Brenda reviewed the syllabus. They would start by reading Fleming Trainor, and then they would compare and contrast
The Innocent Impostor
with the works of contemporary authors: Lorrie Moore, Richard Russo, Anne Lamott, Rick Moody, Adam Haslett, Antonya Nelson, Andre Dubus. The reading list was so delicious, Brenda wanted to eat it with a knife and fork.
There’s a wait list for your class,
Mrs. Pencaldron said.
Thirty-three people long. In the fall, Dr. Atela wants to add another section. Does she?
Brenda had said. The department chair, Suzanne Atela, was only five feet tall, but she was exotic and formidable. She was a native of the Bahamas and had cocoa-butter skin without a single line of age, although Brenda knew her to be sixty-two years old, the mother of four, the grandmother of fourteen. She had published copiously on the literature of the Beat generation, and there were rumors she had slept with one of the minor players, a cousin of Ginsburg’s, which seemed fantastical to Brenda, but who knew what the woman was like when she took off her harlequin glasses and unpinned her hair? Her husband was a handsome Indian man; Brenda had never met him, though she’d seen a photograph of him wearing a tuxedo, on Suzanne Atela’s desk. Suzanne Atela was formidable only because she held Brenda’s future, and that of every other untenured professor in the department, in her tiny, delicate hands.

Brenda surveyed her class list. Upon initial inspection, it looked as though she had struck gold. It looked like she had gotten a class of
only women
. This was too good to be true! Brenda started amending the reading list in her mind—with a class of only women, they could attack Fleming Trainor and the problem of identity with a gender slant. Just as Brenda started scribbling down the titles of some really incendiary feminist texts, her eyes hit on the last name on the list:
Walsh, John
.
Sophomore.

Mrs. Pencaldron had tapped on Brenda’s office door. “There’s been a change, Dr. Lyndon,” she said. “You’ll be teaching your seminar in the Barrington Room.”

Brenda grinned stupidly even as she crumpled her list of incendiary feminist texts and threw it away. First the cappuccino, then a mention of teaching two sections next year, and now the Barrington Room, which was the crown jewel of the department. It was used for special occasions—department meetings, faculty luncheons—and Suzanne Atela taught her graduate students in that room. It had a long, polished Queen Anne table and an original Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall.

“The Barrington Room?” Brenda had said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “Follow me.”

They made their way down the hushed hallway to the end, where the door, dark and paneled, loomed with importance.

“Now,” Mrs. Pencaldron said, “I’m required to go over the rules. No drinks on the table—no cans, no bottles, no coffee cups. The room must be opened and locked by you and you must never leave the students in the room alone with the painting.
Capiche?
”

“
Capiche,
” Brenda said.

Mrs. Pencaldron gave Brenda a long, unwavering look. “I mean it. That painting was bequeathed to the department by Whitmore Barrington and it is worth
a lot
of money. So, for that matter, is the table.”

“Gotcha,” Brenda said. “No drinks.”

“None whatsoever,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “Now, let me give you the security code.”

After Brenda had practiced locking and unlocking the door and setting and disarming the alarm with a long, complicated security code, Mrs. Pencaldron left Brenda to her own devices.

“I hope you realize, Dr. Lyndon, what a privilege it is to teach in that room,” she said as she walked away.

Brenda pitched her cappuccino cup into the trash, then organized her papers at the head of the Queen Anne table and took a second to consider the painting. Ellen Lyndon was a great appreciator of art, and she had passed this appreciation on to her daughters with museum trips that started as soon as Vicki and Brenda were out of diapers. But really, Brenda thought. Really,
really
—wasn’t the Pollock just a mess of splattered paint? Who was the person who designated Pollock as a great artist? Did some people see beyond the splatter to a universal truth, or was it all just nonsense, as Brenda suspected? Literature, at least, had real meaning; it made sense. A painting should make sense, too, Brenda thought, and if it didn’t make sense, then it should be pretty. The Pollock failed on both fronts, but there it hung, and Brenda, despite herself, felt impressed.

It was at that moment, of Brenda feeling impressed but not knowing why, that a man walked into the room. A very handsome man with olive skin and dark eyes, close-cropped black hair. He was Brenda’s age and as tall and strapping as a ranch hand, though he was dressed like John Keats, in a soft Burgundy sweater with a gray wool scarf wrapped around his neck. There was a pencil tucked behind his ear. Brenda thought he must be a graduate student, one of Suzanne Atela’s doctoral candidates, perhaps, who had wandered in accidentally.

“Hi?” she said.

He nodded. “How you going?” He had some sort of broad antipodean accent.

“This is the seminar on Fleming Trainor,” she said. “Are you . . . ?”

“John Walsh,” he said.

John Walsh. This was John Walsh. Brenda felt her good sense unraveling in her brain like a ball of yarn. She had not prepared herself for this—a man in her class, not a boy. He was beautiful, more beautiful than the girl-women who came streaming into the Barrington Room after him like rats following the Pied Piper.

Brenda wiggled her feet in her Prada loafers and stared down at her scrumptious syllabus. Day one, minute one: She was attracted to her sole male student.

Once everyone was settled, she cleared her throat and checked for cups and cans, bottles of water. Nothing. Mrs. Pencaldron must have screened everyone at the door. “I’m Dr. Brenda Lyndon,” she said. “Please call me whatever makes you most comfortable, Dr. Lyndon or Brenda. We are here to study Fleming Trainor’s novel,
The Innocent Impostor,
and to compare and contrast Trainor’s concept of identity with those of contemporary authors. Was everyone able to get the books?”

Nods.

“Good,” Brenda said. She stared at her hands: They were scaly with dry skin, and trembling. She needed a spa treatment. She made a mental note to call Vicki as soon as she got home. “Your assignment for Thursday is the first ten chapters of the book, and I’d like you to have the second half done by next Tuesday.” She waited for the inevitable protests, but she only met with more nods. There was a woman in a wheelchair, a black woman with a short Afro, an Indian woman with fingernails the color of red currants. The other girl-women were varying shades of winter pale with light hair, dark hair, purple hair. And then there was John Walsh, whom Brenda did not look at. “Here is your syllabus.” She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the whisper of the papers being passed around. “You’ll be graded on two papers, one at midterm and one at the end of the semester. You’ll also be graded on your contributions to the discussion, so please notify me if you’re going to miss class. My office hours will be Thursday from nine to eleven.”

Brenda gave the class her cell phone number. She glanced at John Walsh and was both elated and mortified to find he was programming her number right into his phone.

She asked the students to go around the room and say their names, where they were from, and one thing about themselves. She started at the opposite side of the room from John Walsh on purpose—she started with the girl named Amrita from Bangalore, India, who told everyone she took the class because she’d seen that Dr. Lyndon had been given the top teaching marks last semester in the
Pen & Feather.

“I’ve been here three years,” Amrita said. “I’ve encountered many brilliant minds, but I’ve yet to find one decent teacher.”

Amrita was blatantly brownnosing, but Brenda was too preoccupied by John Walsh’s unsettling presence to take the bait.

“Thank you,” Brenda said. “Next?”

The girls continued, and Brenda, half listening, made notes by each name. Jeannie in the wheelchair was a Democrat from Arkansas; Mallory and Kelly were fraternal twins: Mallory wore cat’s-eye glasses, and Kelly, with the purple hair, played a minor role on the soap opera
Love Another Day.
There were three girls named Rebecca; a girl from Guadeloupe named Sandrine, who played guitar in a band called French Toast; the black woman, Michele Nathans, had just returned from a semester in Marrakech; short, squat Amy Feldman was a Japanese major and a sushi aficionado who also admitted, after prompting from one of the Rebeccas, that her father was the president of Marquee Films; and the last girl, named Ivy, announced that she was from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and a lesbian.

Was everyone extra quiet after this announcement, or was it just Brenda’s imagination? Maybe they were, like Brenda, waiting to hear what John Walsh would say.

Slowly, Brenda turned to look at John Walsh, praying she would keep her composure. At the top of her class list, she wrote:
Call Vicki!

John Walsh had removed the pencil from behind his ear, and was turning it slowly in his hands. He raised his eyes to the girl-women and Brenda.

“I’m John Walsh,” he said. “Most people just call me Walsh. I’m from Western Australia, a town called Fremantle.” He tapped his desk with his pencil. “So . . . you probably notice I’m a bit older than your average college sophomore.”

“Yes!” In alarm, Brenda looked at the Jackson Pollock painting, as though it were the painting that had spoken and not her. She waited for the girl-women to giggle, or whisper, but there was silence. Maybe they could teach her how to keep her act together.

“I did my freshman year at the University of W.A.”—this he pronounced
dubya-aye
—“and then I got caught up with a bit of the wanderlust. I dropped out of school. I traveled around the world.”

Brenda knew she should keep her mouth shut, but that was proving impossible. “Around the world?” she said.

“To Thailand and Nepal and India, up through Afghanistan and China into Russia. I’ve been to the Middle East, Jordan, Dubai, Lebanon. And then there was one year in Britain, where I worked at a pub. I spent some time on the continent in Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, Malta, the Canary Islands, Iceland . . . until I got to New York, when I ran out of money.” He stopped. “I’m talking too much, right?”

Right,
thought Brenda. All of the incendiary feminist texts she had ever read would say: Just because you’re the only man in the room does not mean that your life has been more interesting, more authentic, or more worthy than the rest of our (female) lives. But Brenda didn’t want him to stop. For starters, she loved the sound of his voice. It was so . . . masculine. Part Crocodile Dundee, part Crocodile Hunter. Did the other women want him to stop? Brenda quickly surveyed the room. The women had the same expression of placid interest they’d had since they arrived. Well, except for Amrita, the brownnoser. She was agog over Walsh, leaning toward him, nodding. Brenda took this as a sign.

“Go on,” Brenda said.

“From there it gets complicated. I needed a job; I met a bloke at Eddie’s down in the Village whose uncle had a construction company and I started working for him, but that got old right on so I thought, the only way I’m going to get anywhere is to go back to school. So here I am, a thirty-one-year-old sophomore.”

“Well,” said Brenda. Thinking:
He’s older than I am! But he’s a sophomore in college. He’s my
student! “Thank you all for sharing. Does anyone have questions about the course or the syllabus? The assignments?” She paused. Nothing but polite stares. “Okay, then, I think we can call it a day. Please read to chapter ten by Thursday.”

She watched as the girl-women collected themselves and left the room—some alone, some chatting. Jeannie buzzed out in the wheelchair. A cell phone rang—one of the Rebeccas. She said, “Hello? Yeah, I’m out.” As though she’d been in prison. Was it that bad? Had Brenda seemed anything like the person who’d taught last semester? Brenda was so preoccupied with her thoughts that she didn’t realize John Walsh was still sitting. When she saw him, she jumped.

“Geez,” she said, and she laughed. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“I was wondering,” he said. He was turning his pencil again. “Would you like to grab some lunch?”

“What?” Brenda said. She checked the room. Who else had heard? Just her and the Jackson Pollock. Was John Walsh asking her on a date? Her, the professor? The first day of class? “I’m sorry,
what?
”

He didn’t look embarrassed, not even a little bit. “I don’t have another class until two,” he said. “And I don’t know anybody here. This is my first semester. I was kind of hoping there might be some people here my age. I went to the orientation for ‘nontraditional’ students, but . . . you know, there were a couple of fourteen-year-old whiz kids and a housewife in her forties and a guy even older than that who was some kind of tribal chief in Zaire. I’m looking to make some friends.”

“But I’m your professor,” Brenda said.

“So you can’t go get a slice of pizza?”

“Sorry,” Brenda said.

He sighed in an exaggerated way, and then he smiled. He was so attractive that Brenda didn’t even feel comfortable sitting in a room alone with him. She had to get out!

“There are all these silly rules,” she said. She had stumbled across the lines in her
Handbook of Employee Rules and Regulations
when she’d paged through it on the crosstown bus after her orientation.
Romantic or sexual relationships are forbidden between a faculty member and a student. Romantic or sexual comments, gestures, or innuendo are forbidden between a faculty member and a student and will result in disciplinary action. There are no exceptions made for tenured professors.

“I’m over eighteen,” he said. “It’s just pizza.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Brenda said. “I’m sorry.”