Barefoot (37 page)

She inhaled. “One of the professors in the department . . . the drama guy, Bill Franklin . . .”

“Uncle Pervy?” Walsh said.

“Yes. He was at the Cupping Room the night we were there.”

“He was? How do you know? Did he tell you?”

“I recognized him,” Brenda said. “He tried to buy me a drink. I remember him. At the other end of the bar. He was wearing the same suit he wore to the luncheon. And his mustache, with the curlicue ends all waxed, you don’t forget something like that. He winked at me. Oh, God. It’s awful.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t some other bloke with the same suit?”

“I wish it was,” Brenda said. “But I’m sure. And I mean,
sure
. Same guy. And he knows. I’m sure he knows. He said all this stuff about my being young. He said the students must find me ‘intriguing.’”

“Intriguing?”

“He knows. It was the way he said it. He knows, Walsh. Okay, that’s it. I
will
be fired. You will be . . . well, hopefully nothing will happen to you.”

“Come on,” Walsh said.

“We have to stop,” Brenda said. “If I get fired, my career is over. My whole professional life. Everything I’ve worked for, the things I’m building on. Because I would like to stay at Champion, and if Champion doesn’t want to offer me anything permanent, then I would like to teach someplace else. I can’t have a weird sexual thing on my record. No one will hire me.”

“I can’t stop,” Walsh said. “I don’t want to stop.”

“I don’t want to stop, either,” Brenda said. “Obviously. But is this any way to conduct a relationship? Sneaking around, hoping nobody catches us?”

“It hasn’t seemed to bother you before.”

“Well, now everything’s different.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I can’t believe you care what Uncle Pervy thinks. I hear stories about that guy all the time.”

“Yeah, but not with undergraduates. Not with his
own
students.”

“No, but still. That guy has too many skeletons in his own closet to blow the whistle on us . . .”

Brenda slid out of bed and stumbled through the dark apartment to the front door, where she found her sweats in a pile on the floor. Brenda put them on. She thought about how much she loved her class. But Walsh was part of that class and part of why she loved it was because he was in it. She thought of Bill Franklin winking at her. Ugh!
They must find you intriguing. Because I saw you kissing one of your students at a bar.
But that night in the Cupping Room had been nearly two months earlier, and if Bill Franklin hadn’t said anything about it to Suzanne Atela yet, he might be planning to keep it under his hat. After all, he had no reason to sting Brenda. He didn’t even know her. There were only five weeks left in the semester, anyway. The other day Walsh had told Brenda he wanted to take her back to Fremantle and introduce her to his mother, and Brenda had gone so far as to check flights from New York to Perth on the Internet. Brenda thought about their names, side by side at the top of his paper.
John Walsh /Dr. Brenda Lyndon.
He was a college sophomore. He was her student.
Romantic or sexual relationships are forbidden between a faculty member and a student.

“Brindah,” he called out.

Her mind was a muddy puddle.

. . .
and will result in disciplinary action.

“Brindah?”

She couldn’t come up with an answer.

I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop.

I can’t stop.

Brenda didn’t stop. Her relationship with Walsh had too much momentum. And so, they continued to see each other, but only at Brenda’s apartment. Brenda was firm in this. The beautiful weather beckoned; Walsh wanted to be outside. He wanted to walk with Brenda, lie in the grass with Brenda. It was against his nature to be cooped up in her apartment, where the windows didn’t even open. But no, sorry—Brenda said no. She wouldn’t budge.

In class, Brenda was increasingly businesslike, serious, professional. She was young, but that didn’t mean she was frivolous! That didn’t mean she would fly in the face of the strictest university rule and sleep with one of her students!

Brenda was consumed with anxiety, but she had no one to talk about it with. She couldn’t tell her parents or Vicki and she hadn’t spoken to Erik vanCott since their dinner at Craft. The bad news of Erik marrying Noel seemed very minor when compared to the bad news of Brenda losing her job and watching her good name go up in flames. Besides, what would she possibly say?
I’m sleeping with one of my students.
When phrased like that, which was to say, bluntly, without nuance or detail, it sounded tawdry and lecherous. It was the kind of secret that Brenda would have been ashamed to tell her therapist, if she had a therapist. The only person Brenda could vent to was Walsh himself, and he was growing weary of it. Brenda yammered on about getting caught, getting fired, what if, God forbid . . . until the words clinked like worthless coins.
Relax,
he said.
You’re acting like such an American. Obsessing like this.

Brenda’s class read Anne Lamott’s
Crooked Little Heart,
which was the book Amrita the brownnoser had chosen to write her midterm paper on, and yet Amrita’s customary seat, to Brenda’s right, was vacant first on Tuesday and then again on Thursday.

“Does anyone know where Amrita is?” Brenda asked.

There was throat-clearing, a noise that sounded like a sneeze but could just as easily have been a snicker from one of the Rebeccas, a bunch of downcast eyes. Brenda got a funny vibe, but she couldn’t pinpoint it and no one in the class was going to talk. Brenda scribbled,
Call Amrita!
at the top of her notes.

Spring break arrived. Walsh had rugby games in Van Cortlandt Park, he wanted Brenda to come watch him, they could picnic afterward, but she refused.
I can’t. Someone will see me. Someone will figure it out.
Erik vanCott called and left a message, asking Brenda to be the best man in his wedding. Brenda thought he was kidding, but then he left another message.
Best man?
she thought. Would she have to stand on the altar looking like Victor Victoria while “marriage material” Noel looked stunning in silk shantung and tulle? For her vacation, Brenda took the train up to Darien to see Vicki, Ted, and the kids. Vicki wasn’t feeling well; she’d been to the hospital for tests. Walking pneumonia, they thought it was. Brenda said,
Ugh, are you contagious?
She washed her hands, she kept a safe distance. She asked Vicki about being Erik vanCott’s best man.
Tuxedo?
she said.
Black dress,
Vicki said.
But nothing too sexy. You’re not allowed to upstage the bride.
One night, when Ted was out with clients, Brenda nearly confessed to Vicki about Walsh, but she held her tongue. Instead, they talked about Nantucket. Would they go, together, separately, when would they go, how long would they stay? Vicki said,
I have a family, Bren. I have to plan.
Brenda said,
Just let me get through this semester.

After spring break, Brenda started holding class outside, in the quad, under a spindly, urban tree. She was thinking of summer, of time on Nantucket, she was thinking:
Walsh wants to spend time with me outside, here it is.
She also wanted to keep a low profile in the department. If she wasn’t there, she reasoned, nothing bad could happen.

She left three messages for Amrita—two on Amrita’s cell phone and one at Amrita’s apartment, where a roommate promised to pass the message along. Had Amrita dropped the class? That seemed so unlikely that Brenda figured she must have contracted mono, or had to fly back to India to bury a dead grandmother. Students like Amrita didn’t drop a class they were acing.

And then, one day, two weeks before final papers were due, two weeks before Brenda and Walsh were in the clear, Brenda found a note taped to her office door.
SEE ME! S.A.

Brenda removed the note and held it in her hand. Her hand was steady. She wasn’t nervous. Suzanne Atela could want a hundred things. The semester was ending; there was next year to consider. There had been talk of Brenda picking up another section. It was either that or some other administrative thing. Brenda wasn’t nervous or worried.

Suzanne Atela wasn’t in her office. Brenda checked with Mrs. Pencaldron, who without a word uncapped her Montblanc pen and elegantly scripted a phone number on a peach-colored index card.

“She wants me to call her?” Brenda said.

Terse nod. Mrs. Pencaldron picked up her own phone and handed the receiver to Brenda.

Suzanne Atela wanted to meet at Feed Your Head, in the student union. Brenda agreed, handed the phone back to Mrs. Pencaldron, stifled a groan. She wasn’t nervous or worried; she was merely inconvenienced. She was supposed to meet Walsh at her apartment with take-out Indian food at one. In the stairwell, she called Walsh to cancel.

At quarter to twelve, Feed Your Head was packed. Packed! Brenda realized how removed she had been from the student body of Champion University. She knew twelve students out of six thousand. She’d been teaching for nearly an entire school year and she’d never once eaten on campus. And no wonder. She paid twelve-fifty for a soggy tuna sub, fruit salad, and a bottle of water. She wandered past a bunch of girl-women watching a soap opera as she searched for Suzanne Atela. It took a few minutes to find her because Brenda was, of course, looking for a woman alone. Dr. Atela was not alone, however. She was sitting at a table with Bill Franklin and Amrita.

Brenda nearly turned and ran—it would have been easy to get lost in the crowd—but Amrita saw her and frowned. She nudged Dr. Atela, and Dr. Atela turned and drew Brenda over to the table with a steady, disapproving gaze over the top of her glasses. Bill Franklin was wearing a blue seersucker suit and a bow tie. With his waxed mustache, he looked old-fashioned and ridiculous, like a carnival barker. His attention was glued to the soap opera, showing on a screen over Atela’s head.

As Brenda approached the table, her bowels did a twisty thing that made her think she might need a bathroom. She eased down in a molded plastic chair next to Atela.

“Hi,” she said. “Amrita. Dr. Franklin. I didn’t realize this was a meet—”

Suzanne Atela sliced through the air with her arm and checked her slim, gold watch. “I have a lunch at Picholine in an hour,” she said. Her voice was so taut there was no trace of her accent. “I’ll get right to the point. There are some indelicate rumors circulating about you, Dr. Lyndon.”

“Rumors?” Brenda said. “About me?”

Amrita clucked and made eyes. Brenda regarded the girl. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and combed slick against her head; it was gathered in a schoolmarm’s bun at the nape of her neck. Her skin was grayish, and she wore red lipstick, the same crimson as her fingernails. She was wearing jeans and a yellow Juicy Couture hooded sweatshirt. She did not look so different from the rest of Champion’s students, and yet she stood out, not because of her culture, but because of the intensity with which she pursued her education. She had missed five classes, which was enough for Brenda to fail her for the semester.
What did I do to you?
Brenda thought.
You wanted teaching and teaching you got. I engaged you, I took your points, I showered you with praise. What more did you want?

Bill Franklin cleared his throat, and then, with difficulty it seemed, he ripped his attention away from the TV. “We’re talking about more than just rumors, Suzanne,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be wasting our time. Or Dr. Lyndon’s time.”

“Quite right, Dr. Franklin,” Suzanne Atela said.

For some reason, the TV above Dr. Atela’s head snagged Brenda’s attention. On the screen was Brenda’s student Kelly Moore, her purple hair spiked like a Muppet. So this was
Love Another Day
. Kelly Moore’s character kissed a man twice her age, then there was a struggle, a slap. She escaped the man and ran out of the room, flinging the door closed.

Amrita reached into her ornately embroidered silk book bag and pulled out her midterm paper, which had copious notes and exclamations of praise from Brenda in blue pen, and an A at the top.

“We know what’s going on with you and Walsh,” Amrita said. “Everybody knows. It’s disgusting.”

Dr. Atela removed her harlequin glasses and placed them on the sticky Formica table with a sigh. Brenda took a yoga breath. She was prepared for this, wasn’t she? She had lived through this scene in her mind a thousand times in the last three weeks. And yet, the word “disgusting” threw her. “Disgusting” was the teacher who became impregnated by her seventh-grade student. Walsh was a year older than Brenda; a relationship between them was natural. Except he was her student. So it was wrong. It was indelicate, as Atela had said, unwise, a bad decision. It was against university rules. But it was not disgusting. Brenda was so busy thinking this through that she didn’t say a word, and after a number of seconds had passed, this seemed like a brilliant strategy. Don’t even dignify the accusation with a response.

“Dr. Lyndon?” Suzanne Atela said.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brenda said.

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

“I saw you with him downtown,” Bill Franklin said. “At the beginning of the semester. One of the things I noticed—in addition to your obvious attraction to one another—was that he paid the bill. The reason why faculty are forbidden from dating students is because of the power differential. He buys you drinks, you give him grades . . .”

“What are you suggesting?” Brenda said. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”

“I really respected you,” Amrita said. She fingered the zipper of her sweatshirt, unzipped it an inch, zipped it back up. Up, down, up, down. She was nervous. Brenda should capitalize on that fact, but she didn’t know how. “I loved your class. I thought, finally, a real teacher, someone young, someone I could
relate
to.” Here, Amrita’s voice wavered. “But then it turns out that
you’re
the impostor—and not so innocent. You’re having a . . .
thing
with Walsh. You gave him an A plus on his paper!”