Barefoot (31 page)

“Bren?”

“What?” Brenda said, and she started to cry.

Erik reached across the table for her hand. He held it tight and stroked it with his other hand. The blue box sat on the table between them, unopened. Brenda heard whispers, and she realized that somehow she and Erik had attracted the attention of their neighboring diners—who thought, no doubt, that Erik was proposing to Brenda.

“Put the ring away,” Brenda whispered. “Please.”

Erik slid the box back into his pocket but he didn’t let go of Brenda’s hand. They had never actually touched this way, and Brenda found it both breathtaking and exquisitely painful.

“Are you happy for me?” Erik said.

“Happy for you,” she said. “Unhappy for me.”

“Brenda Lyndon.”

She saw the weight lifter approaching their table, but she couldn’t deal with another minute of this date. She pushed away from the table. “I’m going.”

“You’re walking out on me again?” Erik said. “Again, in the middle of dinner?” He started in with the awful David Soul song.
“Don’t give up on us, baby. We’re still worth one . . . more try . . .”

“That’s not going to work,” Brenda said.

“Brenda,” Erik said, and Brenda looked at him.

“What?”

“I love her.”

Brenda stood up and left Erik at the table. She was crying for many reasons, not least of all because true love always seemed to happen to other women—women like Vicki, women like Noel. Brenda could practically see Noel, naked in Erik’s bed, which he had always fondly referred to as his nest. Noel was in the nest, naked, nesting, not eating. Alabaster skin, hair like a mink, naked except for pearl earrings. Ribs showing through her skin like the keys of a marimba that Erik could play while he sang. Brenda left the restaurant.

“Eighty-second Street,” Brenda told the cab driver waiting outside of Craft, who was, of all things, American. Benny Taylor, the license said. “And do you have any tissues?”

A small package of Kleenex came through the Plexiglas shield. “Here you go, sweetheart.”

Benny Taylor delivered Brenda to her apartment at ten minutes to ten.

“Are you going to be okay, sweetheart?” Benny Taylor said.

He was asking not because she was crying, but because there was a man lingering by the door of Brenda’s building. The man was tall and dressed entirely in black. Brenda squinted; her heart knocked around. It was John Walsh.

“I’ll be fine,” Brenda said. She tried to straighten her clothes and smooth her hair. Her makeup would be a wash. She pulled money out of her purse for Benny Taylor and ransacked her brain for something to say when she got out of the cab.
Hi? What are you doing here?
Brenda’s ankles were weak, and the three drinks had taken custody of her sense of balance. Benny Taylor drove away; Brenda walked as steadily as she could toward Walsh, who was smiling. He was as dashing as the hero in an old Western. Strong, masculine, Australian. Brenda tried to be cool, but she found it impossible to wipe the stupid grin off her face.

“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

John Walsh became her lover. He was her lover for days, weeks, months. It was exhilarating, delicious, and a holy, guarded secret. They never spoke on university property except during class, and Walsh stopped hanging around afterward. He called her cell phone—two rings then a hang-up was his signal—and they met at her apartment. If they couldn’t wait the forty-five minutes it would take to get across town, they met in Riverside Park, where they kissed behind a stand of trees. They hunkered down in Brenda’s apartment through one blizzard, eating scrambled eggs, drinking red wine, making love, watching old Australian movies, like
Breaker Morant
. John Walsh told Brenda things—about a girl he got pregnant in London who had an abortion, about his grandfather who worked in the interior of Western Australia shearing sheep. He told her about his travels around the world. Brenda talked about her life growing up in Pennsylvania, her parents, Vicki, summers in Nantucket with Aunt Liv, college, graduate school, Fleming Trainor. It was dull in comparison, but Walsh made her life seem fascinating. He asked the right questions, he listened to the answers, he was emotionally available and mature. What Brenda loved most about Walsh was his gravity. He wasn’t afraid of serious topics; he wasn’t afraid to look inside himself. Maybe that was how Australians were raised, or maybe it was because of his travels, but Brenda didn’t know another man like this. Even Erik, even Ted, even her father. Ask them to talk about their feelings and they looked at her like she was asking them to shop for tampons.

During the second blizzard that winter, Brenda and Walsh bundled up so completely that no one would ever recognize them and they went sledding in Central Park. As the days passed, they got braver. They went to the movies (Brenda wore a baseball hat and sunglasses. She did not let Walsh hold her hand until the theater went dark). They went to dinner. They had drinks out, they went dancing. They never once saw anyone they knew.

At some point along the way, Brenda stopped thinking of Walsh as her student. He was her lover. He was her friend. But then came the Monday night that changed everything. Brenda was home alone, grading the midterm papers. She had put this off for as long as possible, and the girl-women in the class had started to complain; Brenda had promised the class their papers back the following morning and she had one paper yet to read. To his credit, Walsh hadn’t asked her about it. Possibly he’d forgotten it was her job to grade it. It was with great trepidation that she picked up the paper with their names typed together at the top—
John Walsh / Dr. Brenda Lyndon
—and read.

What was she afraid of? She was afraid the paper would be bad—poorly organized, poorly argued, with typos and misspellings and comma splices. She was scared he would write “different than” rather than “different from.” She was scared he would regurgitate what she’d said in class rather than think for himself (as one of the Rebeccas did, earning a flat C); she was scared he would accidentally quote somebody without noting a source. The paper was a potential relationship-ender—not only because he might get angry at a lousy grade, but because Brenda would not be able to continue seeing him if she had any qualms about his intelligence.

Nearly everyone else in the class chose to compare Calvin Dare to one of the characters from the books on their reading list. Not Walsh. He picked a book that wasn’t on the reading list, a book Brenda had never read, a novel called
The Riders
by a Western Australian named Tim Winton. Walsh’s paper targeted what he called the “identity of loss”—or how losing something or someone in one’s life caused a change in that person’s identity. In
The Innocent Impostor,
when Calvin Dare’s horse kills Thomas Beech, Dare loses his confidence in his life path. The event shakes him to the core and causes him to relinquish his own dreams and ambitions and take up those of Beech. In
The Riders,
the main character, Scully, has lost his wife—quite literally
lost
her. She flies to Ireland with their daughter, but mysteriously, only the daughter gets off the plane.
The Riders
was a search for Scully’s wife but it was also a study of how one man’s identity changes because of this loss. Brenda was riveted. Walsh presented his thesis statement clearly in the first three pages, he backed it up with ten pages of textual support from both novels, and he ended, brilliantly, by citing other instances of the identity of loss across a wide scope of literature. It could be found, Walsh said, everywhere from
Huckleberry Finn
to
Beloved
.

Brenda put the paper down, stunned. For a point of reference, she reread Amrita’s paper (which she had given an A) and then she read Walsh’s paper again. Walsh’s paper was different, it was original, as fresh and sun-drenched as the country he came from, but with a depth that could only come with age and experience. She gave Walsh an A+. Then she worried. She was giving Walsh the highest grade in the class. Was that fair? His paper was the best. Could she prove it? It was a subjective judgment. Would anyone suspect? Was the A+ in any way related to the fact that John Walsh made love to his professor on this very couch, bringing her enough pleasure that she cried out?

Brenda wrote the grade at the top of the paper in very light pencil, in case she changed her mind. But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to change the grade: He had earned it, fair and square. Still, she worried. She worried she was falling in love.

By the time Brenda made it back to the oncology waiting room, her concentration was shot. Amrita’s accusations (true) blended with Didi’s accusations (untrue).
You’re fucking Josh. Admit it.
Brenda packed up her screenplay and decided not to tell anyone about what had transpired in the ladies’ room.

A few seconds later, Vicki came down the hall, escorted by Dr. Alcott. Brenda blinked. Was that her sister, really? It looked like Vicki had shrunk—she seemed to have lost height as well as weight. She was as frail as Aunt Liv had been in the month before she died (and Aunt Liv had been petite anyway, eighty-five pounds in her wool overcoat). Vicki was wearing the Louis Vuitton scarf on her head, a pair of white shorts that sat on her hips, a pink tank top that made it seem like she had no breasts at all, and a navy cashmere zip-up hooded sweater because with a fever of 104, she was freezing. Brenda’s mind had been far away in both time and place, but in a flash she resumed her attitude of urgent, incessant prayer.
Dear Lord, please, please, please, please, please . . .

Dr. Alcott handed Vicki over. The waiting room was empty, but still he lowered his voice. “We’ve given her a shot of Neupogen, and she’ll have to be brought in tomorrow and the following day for shots. That should get her counts to rise. I’m also prescribing antibiotics, and Tylenol to get her fever down. She should be feeling better in a few days. We’ll try again with a reduced dose of the chemo when her counts are up.” He looked at Vicki. “Okay?”

She shivered. “Okay.”

Brenda clenched Vicki’s arm. “Is there anything else?”

“She should rest,” Dr. Alcott said. “I don’t know about any more beach picnics.”

“Okay,” Brenda said quickly. She was already so racked with guilt (about Walsh, about kissing Josh, about writing instead of praying) and regret (about the goddamned A+, about the Jackson Pollock painting, about not telling Didi to fuck right off)—what did it matter if Dr. Alcott placed blame for the beach picnic at her feet as well?
I was trying to make her feel better,
Brenda might have said.
I was taking a holistic approach.
But instead, she bleated, “I’m sorry.”

Out in the car, Vicki pulled a fleece blanket around her legs and melted into the seat.

“I got what I deserved,” Vicki said.

“What do you mean?” Brenda said.

“I wanted to be done with chemo,” Vicki said. “And now chemo’s done with me. Once a week, a low dosage. It wouldn’t kill a one-winged fly.”

“You don’t think?”

“The cancer’s going to rally,” Vicki said. “It’s going to spread.”

“Stop it, Vick. You’ve got to keep a positive attitude.”

“And I will have brought it on myself.”

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Brenda said. “It’s not your fault you’re sick.”

“It’s my fault I’m not getting better,” Vicki said. “I suck at getting better.” She leaned her head against the window. “God, the guilt.”

Brenda started the car. “Amen to that,” she said.

T
he heart wants what it wants,
Melanie thought. And so, on the morning after her first prenatal appointment, she called Peter at the office.

Melanie was lying in bed, listening to the wren that habitually sang from its perch on the fence outside her window, with her eyes closed. She was tired because she and Josh had been out again the night before—to Quidnet Pond—and she hadn’t gotten home until after midnight. Earlier that day, Melanie had gone with Vicki to the hospital. While Vicki was getting a shot to bring her blood counts back up, Melanie had an appointment with a surly GP, a white-haired doctor perhaps a month or two shy of retirement. The man had zero bedside manner, but Melanie didn’t care. She had heard her baby’s heartbeat.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
What she hadn’t anticipated was the enormous chasm between imagining the sound of the heartbeat and actually hearing it. The pregnancy was real. It was healthy and viable. She was ten weeks along; the baby was the size of a plum.

Now, she placed a hand on her abdomen. “Hello,” she whispered. “Good morning.”

She had been waiting for a sign. It had been easy to keep the news from Peter because, although Melanie had been sick and so, so tired, there had been no visible manifestation of the pregnancy. She didn’t even look pregnant. But that heartbeat had been real, it had been undeniable, and that was her cue. It wasn’t that she felt she had to tell Peter. She
wanted
to tell Peter.

And so, once Josh and the kids left the house and once Brenda headed out to write, and once Vicki’s bedroom door was securely closed, Melanie scuffed down to the ’Sconset Market and called Peter from the pay phone outside.

Melanie took a deep drink of ’Sconset morning: the blue, blooming hydrangeas, the freshly mown grass of the rotary, the smell of the clay tennis courts across the street at the casino, the scent of coffee and rolls and fresh newsprint coming from the market itself. And then there was the smell of Josh on her skin. Even if Peter was mean to her, even if he refused to believe her, he would not be able to ruin her day.

“Good morning,” the receptionist said. “Rutter, Higgens.”

Even if he said he didn’t care.

“Peter Patchen, please,” Melanie said, trying to sound business-like.

“One moment, please.”

There was a pause, a click, then ringing. Melanie was overcome with fear, anxiety, the same old negative Peter-feelings that she thought she’d buried.
Shit!
she thought.
Hang up!
But before there was time to orchestrate a hang up, Melanie heard Peter’s voice. “Hello? Peter Patchen.”