Barefoot (30 page)

Vicki was meeting with Dr. Alcott behind closed doors. Vicki’s white blood cell count had dropped dramatically, and she was running a fever of nearly 104. Dr. Alcott wanted to defer chemo until her counts rose and the fever abated. If ever there was a day when Brenda should have been praying, it was today—but for whatever reason, Brenda found that the only place she could now get any writing done was the oncology waiting room. It was all such a head game! Brenda had a block of time to work in peace at the beach each morning. But when she was at the beach, she got stuck, she was a dry well, she thought only of Walsh. She had tried the Even Keel Cafe one more time, but that had been worse—she fixated on the other couples eating breakfast, holding hands, whispering to each other, sharing sections of the newspaper. The Milky Way coffee seemed too sweet. Brenda found she could write her screenplay only when she was supposed to be doing something else. Like praying. Like worrying.

Her phone rang again. Brenda was smack in the middle of the scene where Calvin Dare attends the funeral service for Thomas Beech—hiding in the back so as not to be recognized as the man who owned the murderous horse—and this is when he first sets eyes on Beech’s beautiful, bereaved fiancée, Emily. Brenda could see the scene with cinematic clarity—the tilt of Dare’s black hat, the meeting of gazes across a dozen crowded church pews, Dare’s decision then and there to summon the courage to speak to Emily. He approaches her on the church steps after the service to offer his condolences.

Did you know my Thomas?
Emily asks, perplexed.
Were you a friend?

And Calvin Dare, taking a chance, answers,
Yes, a friend from boyhood. I had not seen him in some time. I have been away.

Away?
Emily asks.

Abroad.

Emily’s eyebrows arch. She’s young, she was only engaged to Beech for a short while, and (as Brenda argued in her thesis) she is something of an opportunist. She’s saddened by the death of her intended but also intrigued by this stranger, this friend of Thomas’s from boyhood who has just returned from abroad.

Really?
Emily says, in a way that could mean almost anything.

The phone stopped, then rang again. “Für Elise,” the ring tone, was truly awful—it sounded like an organ-grinder monkey inside a tin can. Brenda reached blindly into her purse and pulled the phone out.

Her mother.

Brenda sighed. Put down her pen. Ellen Lyndon had gone into conniptions upon hearing about Vicki’s fever; she would want to know what the doctor said. Brenda had to go to the bathroom anyway. She took the call.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How is she?”

“Still in with the doctor.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“Well, what did he say about the fever?”

Brenda moved down the hall to the ladies’ room. “I have no idea. She’s still in with him.”

“They didn’t tell you anything?”

“They never tell me anything. They tell Vicki and Vicki tells me. So, we have to wait.” Brenda pushed into the ladies’ room, where her voice bounced back at her from off the tile walls.

“How long did they say . . . ?”

“They didn’t say, Mom.” Brenda chastised herself. She should never have answered the phone. This kind of conversation frustrated them both. “Listen, I’ll call you when . . .”

“You promise?”

“I promise. In fact, I’ll have Vicki call so you can hear it straight from the horse’s . . .”

“Okay, darling. Thank you. I’m here waiting. I cancelled my physical therapy appointment.”

“Why?” Brenda said. “You want your knee to get better, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t be able to concentrate,” she said. “Kenneth always asks for a ‘dedicated effort’ with the exercises, and I wouldn’t be able to give it to him. He always knows when I’m distracted.”

I should be distracted,
Brenda thought.
But the opposite is true. Because I’m wired the wrong way.

“Okay, Mom,” Brenda said. “Good-bye.”

“Call me when . . .”

“You bet,” Brenda said, then she hung up. There was a flushing noise and a bathroom stall opened. A girl stepped out. Brenda smiled sheepishly and said, “Mothers!”

The girl ignored Brenda, which was fine. But when Brenda stepped out of the stall herself a few minutes later, the girl was still there, eyeing Brenda in the mirror.

“Hey,” the girl said. “I know you. Josh works for you.”

Brenda looked at the girl more closely. Of course. A push-up bra peeked out from the scoop neck of the girl’s white T-shirt, and then there was the streaky blusher. It was the little vixen from Admitting. Brenda eyed the name tag.
Didi.
Ah, yes.

“That’s right,” Brenda said. “I’m Brenda. I forgot that you knew Josh.”

“Damn right I know him.”

Brenda washed her hands and reached for a paper towel. Didi rummaged through her bag and pulled out a cigarette, which she proceeded to light up.

“We really like Josh,” Brenda said. “He does a great job with the kids.”

“You pay him a fuckload of money,” Didi said. This sounded like an accusation.

“I don’t know about that,” Brenda said. “I’m not in charge of paying him.”

“Have you slept with him?”

Brenda turned to Didi just as Didi blew a stream of smoke from her mouth. Brenda hoped her face conveyed her disgust, combined with the fact that she was too dignified to answer such an absurd question. But Brenda couldn’t help remembering the kiss on the front lawn. Certainly Josh hadn’t told anyone about
that?

“You’re not supposed to be smoking in here,” Brenda said. “It’s a
hospital
. Some people have
lung cancer
.”

Didi curled her lip into a snarl, and Brenda was overcome with the feeling that she had somehow reverted back to high school—she was trapped in the girls’ bathroom with a rebellious smoker who was threatening her.

“You’re fucking Josh,” Didi said. “Admit it. Or maybe it’s your sister who’s fucking him.”

“That’s it,” Brenda said. She whipped her wadded-up paper towel into the trash can. “I’m out of here. Good-bye.”

“He never would have turned me down if he wasn’t giving it to one of you,” Didi called out as Brenda flew out the door. “I know it’s one of you!”

Okay,
Brenda thought.
Weird.
And weirder still, Brenda was trembling. Well, maybe it wasn’t so weird that she was rattled—after all, the worst moment of her life had shared certain elements with that little scene in the bathroom. A girl, young enough to be Brenda’s student, accusing her of improper relations.

Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism.

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.

We understand, Dr. Lyndon, that you’ve been having improper relations with one of your students.

The “improper relations” were Brenda’s fault. It would have been nice to blame Walsh for pursuing her, but ultimately Brenda was the professor and Walsh the student and Brenda had let it happen. There had been the drinks at the Cupping Room and the kissing—when Brenda woke up the following morning she felt deeply ashamed and terrifically energized. She thought perhaps John Walsh would call her cell phone but he didn’t, and by Tuesday morning, she thought maybe she had imagined the whole thing. But in class Walsh sat in his usual seat, surrounded by lovely girl-women, all of whom now seemed to Brenda to be flaunting their bright intelligence like feather boas for his sake. Every time Amrita the brownnoser contributed to class discussion, she looked to Walsh right away, to see if he agreed with her point or not. And Kelly Moore, the soap opera actress, was even worse, with all of her theatrics aimed in his direction. The three Rebeccas had basically formed a John Walsh Fan Club.
He’s so hot,
Brenda overheard one of the Rebeccas saying.
Everybody wants him.
Walsh, for his part, was disarmingly blasé. He had no idea that he was sitting in a classroom of adoring fans.

At the end of class, Brenda handed out the topic of the midterm paper:
Compare and contrast Calvin Dare’s identity crisis with an identity crisis of a character from contemporary literature, either on or off the reading list. Fifteen pages.
The girls groaned and filed out. Walsh stayed put.

Brenda looked up. “No,” she said. “Go. You have to go.”

He stared at her in a way that made her sick with desire. He didn’t say a word; as Brenda remembered it, he didn’t say one thing. He just stood there, looking at her. Brenda was stupid with her longing for him—and, too, she was egotistical. The other girls—girls far younger and prettier than she—all wanted him, but she was the one who was going to get him. She scribbled her address down on a piece of paper and pressed it into his hand, then she ushered him toward the door.

“Go,” she said. “I have to lock up.” She tilted her head. “Because of the painting.”

He didn’t show up that night or the next night, and Brenda felt like an idiot. She thought maybe he was a double agent hired by the other professors in the English Department who, jealous about her top teaching marks and subsequent superstar status, were trying to frame her. She thought maybe this was an elaborate practical joke dreamed up by the girl-women in the class. On Thursday, she vowed not to look Walsh’s way, though of course she did, several times. Sandrine, the singer from Guadeloupe, had managed to sneak a can of Fresca, which she was resting on her thigh, past Mrs. Pencaldron’s drinks radar. Brenda asked her to please throw it away. Sandrine had risen, reluctantly, and murmured something in French that half of the girl-women laughed at. Brenda became furious, though she was cognizant of the fact that she was not furious with Sandrine, or even with Walsh, but rather, with herself. She was fretting about the piece of paper with her address on it. It was just a piece of paper, just her address—it didn’t
mean
anything—and yet, it did. Brenda had given Walsh her permission, she had given him her heart. This may have sounded ridiculous, but that was how she felt. She had pressed her heart into his palm and what had he done with it? Nothing. Walsh didn’t linger after class; he filed out the door behind miffed Sandrine and the rest of the girl-women, and Brenda was crushed.

That night, Brenda was to meet Erik vanCott for dinner downtown at Craft. They were going alone, the two of them, without Noel, which should have made Brenda happy. Craft was a real restaurant, a
New York–
magazine type of restaurant. It had leather walls and a bottleneck of people at the door. Everyone was dressed up, smelling good, using important voices, talking on cell phones (
I’m here. Where are you?
), waiting to get in, in, in. Brenda stood on her tiptoes and tried to see over shoulders and around heads, but she couldn’t locate Erik. She stood in the general mass waiting to talk to the gorgeous woman at the podium (her name was Felicity; Brenda overheard someone else say it). Brenda worried that she had the wrong place or the wrong time or the wrong night, or that she’d dreamt the phone call altogether. When finally it was Brenda’s turn to talk to Felicity, she said, “I’m meeting someone. Erik vanCott?”

Felicity’s eyes flickered over her very important reservation sheet. “Here it is: vanCott,” Felicity said in a minor-league,
how-about-that
voice, as if she’d just found a dollar on the sidewalk. “Mr. vanCott has not yet arrived and the table isn’t quite ready. Would you like to have a drink at the bar?”

At the bar, Brenda downed two cosmos. Then Felicity announced that the table was ready, and Brenda decided to sit, despite the fact that she was alone. She ordered another cosmo from a waiter who also appeared to be a professional weight lifter.

“I’m meeting someone,” Brenda told him, hoping this was true. She checked her cell phone for a message. Nothing. It was eight-thirty. She had officially been stood up by two men in one week. But then she looked up and saw Erik darting toward her from across the room, the tails of his Burberry raincoat flying. The boy who’d chased Brenda on the playground, who once ate a whole jar of pistachios in one sitting in Ellen Lyndon’s kitchen and then threw up in Ellen Lyndon’s powder room, the lovelorn boy who had sung a Bryan Adams song at his prom after being ditched by Vicki, was now a man who made money, who wore suits, who met Brenda in snazzy New York restaurants.

“Am I late?” he said.

“No,” Brenda lied.

“Good,” he said. He collapsed into the chair across from Brenda, shed his raincoat, loosened his tie, and ordered a bottle of wine in impeccable French.

Brenda was dying to tell him the story of Walsh. There was no one else she could tell; her life was devoid of close girlfriends, and she couldn’t tell Vicki and she couldn’t tell her mother. Plus, Erik would be able to give her a male perspective, plus Brenda wanted Erik to know that yes, she did have men in her life other than him. However, in the twenty million years of their friendship, rules had developed, and one of those rules was that Brenda always asked about Erik first.

“So,” she said, dipping into her third cosmo. “How’s everything?”

“You mean Noel?”

“We can talk about Noel if you want,” Brenda said, though, really, she had hoped for a Noel-less evening.

“I have something to tell you,” Erik said.

We broke up,
Brenda thought. If that was the case, she would talk about Noel all night. Good-bye to Noel, closure with Noel, and, of course, the requisite Noel-bashing.

Erik pulled a blue velvet box out of his suit jacket, and Brenda thought,
He has a ring. For me?
But even three cosmos didn’t alter reality that much.

“I’m going to ask Noel to marry me,” Erik said.

Brenda blinked. Marry him? She gazed at the box. She was sure the ring was lovely, but she didn’t ask to see it. She had no right to be surprised—Erik had warned her. He had called Noel “marriage material.” But Noel had a flaw: She didn’t eat. A person who didn’t eat had a serious esteem problem, a self-image problem. Brenda had written Noel off at Café des Bruxelles, and she thought Erik had, too. Brenda was mute. If Erik knew how much Brenda loved him, he would have done her a favor and called her on the phone so she could just hang up.