Barefoot (24 page)

“I have to pee,” Blaine announced. He looked to Josh, as if for permission, and Josh nodded, his eyes still trained on Melanie. Blaine left the table.

Melanie cut into her eggs; the yolks weren’t as runny as she’d hoped. “I saw you kissing Brenda,” she said.

Josh hissed like a balloon losing air and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “She kissed me, actually.”

“It didn’t look terribly one-sided,” Melanie said.

“I thought maybe she meant something by it,” he said. “But she didn’t. She was just feeling desperate, you know, about Vicki, and she wanted my help.” He shifted Porter in his arms and brushed his lips against the top of Porter’s head. Melanie ate her eggs and toast. She couldn’t bear to hear any more, and yet she had to know.

“Help how?”

“Talk to Vicki. Get her to go to chemo. Which I did, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if
I
did anything, but she went.”

Melanie nodded. The bereft, third-wheel, left-out feeling returned. There were dramas taking place all over this house that she didn’t even know about. “So, what about Brenda?”

“Well, she’s in love with someone else,” Josh said. “Some student of hers back in New York.”

“John Walsh,” Melanie said. She took another, more lustful bite of her eggs. Her anger and confusion were starting to clear. Melanie heard the toilet flush and Blaine called out for Josh. He smiled and stood up.

“So . . . whatever. It’s no big deal. She digs somebody else. I mean . . . well, you know how it is.”

“Yes,” Melanie said. “I do.”

PART TWO

JULY

B
renda had been on Nantucket for more than three full weeks, and she had gotten nowhere on the damned screenplay. Day after day she left the house by nine o’clock for the beach, and she settled on her deserted stretch of sand with a thermos of coffee and her yellow legal pad. She knew the story of
The Innocent Impostor
so intimately it was as if she had written it herself. The book would make a great movie if she could get it right. It was an undiscovered classic with lots of drama and an ambiguous moral message. Brenda could keep it period, cast John Malkovich as Calvin Dare and dress him in frilly lace-collared shirts and a wig. Or maybe she should modernize it: turn Calvin Dare into a Jersey City construction worker who accidentally kills Thomas Beech with his Datsun 300ZX while backing out of a parking space at Shea Stadium after a Bruce Springsteen concert—and who then, through some carefully constructed coincidences, takes over for Beech on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs and starts dating Beech’s fiancée, Emily, who manages the Kate Spade store in Soho. Brenda could visualize the movie as a huge critical and commercial success either way. She even had a tenuous connection in the “business”—her former student Amy Feldman’s father, who was the president of Marquee Films.

But she couldn’t write.

All her life, Brenda had been easily distracted. To work, she needed solitude and absolute quiet. Her parents had arranged for this in high school—Ellen Lyndon turned off the classical music she played on a Bose radio in the kitchen, she turned off the ringer on the phone, she allowed Brenda to skip dinner in order to study in the strictly silent reserve room of the Bryn Mawr College library. And then, in college and graduate school, Brenda sought out places where no one would ever discover her so she could have long, uninterrupted hours of reading and writing. She dead-bolted her apartment door and pulled her shades. One year for Christmas Vicki gave her a sign to hang from her door:
Do Not Disturb: Genius at work.
This was all very tongue in cheek; Vicki was the last person who understood single-mindedness. She had been born a multitasker before such a talent even had a name. But Brenda couldn’t think about two things at once, much less four or five things, and therein lay her problem. How was she supposed to write a screenplay when her mind was crowded with the details of her disgrace, her legal and monetary worries, her absorbing concern for Vicki and the kids—and most of all, her lingering obsession with John Walsh?

Brenda couldn’t stop thinking about Walsh. It was absurd! Brenda was now thinking that
she
should go to the doctor—she needed medication or, better still, surgery.
Remove the obsession with John Walsh. It’s eating me up like cancer; it’s growing in me like a baby.

In three weeks, John Walsh had called only once, right at the beginning, on the day that Blaine was lost and then found, when Melanie answered Brenda’s cell phone and scribbled the message that Brenda had since kept tucked inside her copy of
The Innocent Impostor
. She hadn’t heard Walsh’s voice since she left New York; she hadn’t seen his face. He had pledged his love so ardently, so convincingly, that she thought the phone calls would be as incessant as those from her mother and Brian Delaney, Esquire; she thought Walsh would pursue her until she gave in. But no: There had been the one phone call and that was it. How typically Australian he was!
If you want me,
he was no doubt thinking,
you know where to find me.
Or maybe he just didn’t love her anymore. Maybe he took her words to heart and decided that nothing good could come of their relationship. Maybe now that Brenda’s career was in tatters and her good name sullied, he had lost interest. Maybe he had met someone else. It was fruitless to speculate, but she couldn’t help wondering how he was spending his summer days in the city. Was he back working for the construction company? Was he sitting on scaffolding, hard-hatted and shirtless, eating a sandwich out of a metal lunch box? What did he do at night? Was he working the slow summer-evening shift at the law library as Brenda hoped—or was he out at the clubs, dancing and sleeping around? All of the girl-women in Brenda’s second-semester class had been in love with him—even Kelly Moore, the purple-haired soap opera actress, even Ivy, the lesbian, and especially Amrita, the brownnoser. That had been the problem.

Brenda felt like she was trying to scramble out of a gravel pit but couldn’t unbury her feet. She found it impossible to concentrate. Every five or six minutes she would stare at her yellow legal pad and see the faint blue lines and the empty space between them and she would admonish herself. “Focus!” But the movie playing in her mind wasn’t
The Innocent Impostor
. The two reels endlessly spinning were Brenda and Walsh Together (
The Joy Ride
) and Brenda and Walsh Torn Apart (
The Crash
).

Brenda set her notebook aside and lay back on her towel, raised her face to the sun. She preferred to indulge in the first reel.
The Joy Ride.
The night Brenda and Walsh first got together had started out innocently enough. Brenda met her best friend and forever-secret-true-love, Erik vanCott, and his girlfriend, Noel, at Café des Bruxelles for
moules et frites
. Brenda hated Noel—she had always hated Erik’s girlfriends—but she especially hated Noel because, according to Erik, Noel was “marriage material.” Erik had actually spoken these words out loud, forcing Brenda to face a tough reality: Erik would, most likely, spend his life with someone else, someone who was not Brenda, despite her years of devotion and despite Brenda and Erik’s rich, shared history. Brenda understood that she needed to break away from Erik; loving him was like staying on the
Titanic
and drowning in her stateroom. However, she couldn’t give him up cold turkey, and to see Erik these days meant also seeing Noel.

Noel’s eyes were a warm yellow-brown and her hair was as long and luxurious as a fur coat. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater and little pearl earrings. The three of them were seated at a table meant for two, with Brenda stuck off the side like a tumor. Before the famed
frites
even hit the table, a startling thing happened: Erik and Noel started fighting. Noel wasn’t eating, and Erik had chosen this night of all nights to accuse her of being anorexic.

“You’re not having any bread?”

“It’s my business what I eat. Why do you care?”

“Why do I care? Are you asking me why I
care?
”

Brenda, meanwhile, busied herself with the crusty bread; she slathered it with butter as Eric looked on approvingly. “That’s my girl,” Erik said. “Brenda really knows how to eat.”

“Yeah, well,” Brenda said. “You know me. Indiscriminate.”

A while later, the mussels arrived, with the fries. Noel made a face.

“You really don’t want any?” Erik said to her. “Not a single
frite?
”

“No,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Erik said. “That’s just fine. Brenda will have some, won’t you, Brenda?”

Brenda looked between Erik and Noel. She was being lobbed like a grenade at Noel’s fortress. That was what happened when you were a single person out with a couple; you were either ignored or used as ammunition. Thus, Brenda did the only reasonable thing: She pretended to excuse herself for the ladies’ room and she snuck out of the restaurant.

She stood on Greenwich Avenue at nine o’clock on a Friday night, with people streaming around her like a river around a rock, unsure of what to do next. Her confidence bobbled around like it was attached to a spring. She couldn’t decide if walking out of the restaurant had been a brilliant move or an unforgivably rude one. What would her mother think? At that moment, Brenda’s cell phone rang.
John Walsh,
the display said. She knew she should let the call go to her voice mail—because what were the chances John Walsh was calling to ask about the syllabus? However, Brenda was reeling from Erik and Noel–caused anxiety. Her good sense splattered all over the sidewalk, like she had dropped a melon. She answered the phone.

Brenda met John Walsh at the Cupping Room on Broome Street. She arrived first and ordered a fat glass of Cabernet to calm her nerves, and lo and behold, the bartender informed her that a man at the end of the bar had offered to pay for it. What man? A portly man in a suit with a gray handlebar mustache. A man slightly younger than Brenda’s father. Brenda felt flattered, then creeped out. She was swimming in unfamiliar waters: She was alone in a bar waiting for her student to show up, and a stranger wanted to buy her drink. What was the etiquette here?

“Thank you,” Brenda said to the bartender. “That’s very nice. But I’m meeting someone.”

“Fair enough,” the bartender said. Meaning what, exactly?

No time to think because in the door strolled Walsh, looking so handsome that everyone at the bar stared at him, not least of all the man with the handlebar mustache. Walsh was wearing a black shirt and a black leather jacket, and with his close-cropped hair, his skin, his eyes, well, he was a lethal dose of something. College sophomore. Ha! Brenda took a mouthful of wine, hoping it didn’t turn her teeth blue, and stood up.

He kissed her.

One of her heels slipped on something wet under the bar and she fell back. He caught her arm.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello.” He grinned. “I can’t believe you agreed to meet me.”

That made two of them.

“This is very bad,” Brenda said. “You’re my student. If anyone sees us . . .”

“We’re in Soho,” Walsh said. “It’s like another country.”

For the next three hours, Brenda decided to pretend this was true. She drank her wine and Walsh drank Tanqueray. At first, Walsh talked, which allowed Brenda to obsess.
College sophomore, my student, what the fuck am I doing?
He told Brenda about the town he came from in Western Australia. Fremantle. South Beach, the Cappuccino Strip, the seafood restaurants on the harbor, the weekend markets, the taste of a passion fruit while sitting under a Norfolk pine with the Fremantle Doctor sweeping in off the Indian Ocean. The waves at Cottesloe, a day of sailing on the Swan, the wine and cheese from Margaret River. His family lived in a hundred-year-old limestone-and-brick bungalow in South Fremantle: his mum and dad, his sister, a niece and nephew he had only seen in pictures. His sister’s partner, Eddie, lived there, too, though Eddie and the sister weren’t married and to make matters a bit more dickey—that was his word and Brenda couldn’t help grinning—Eddie was on the dole.

“Not to give you all the grim details up front,” Walsh said. “My mum has a rose garden and my dad finally joined the twenty-first and bought a digital camera, so he sends me pictures of the roses and the tots doddering among the roses.”

“Sounds lovely,” Brenda said. And it did.

“It’s paradise,” Walsh said. “But there was no way for me to know that until I left, only now that I’m here, it’s hard to get back.”

“Will you go back?” Brenda asked.

“Either that or break my mum’s heart.”

The bartender appeared and Walsh ordered a burger. Did Dr. Lyndon want anything?

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Call me Dr. Lyndon. Do it again and I’ll leave.”

He grinned. “Okay, then, Brenda.” He pronounced it “Brindah.” “Want a burger?”

“I’ll have a bite of yours, if that’s okay.”

“No worries. My burger is your burger.”

“I ate a little something earlier,” she said, and with that, she ordered another glass of wine.

“You were out?”

“I was out.” She told Walsh the short story of her aborted dinner with Erik and Noel, then the long story of Erik. “I’ve loved him since I was sixteen,” Brenda said. “Normally people grow up and move on. But not me.”

“I reckon love at sixteen is the best kind of love,” Walsh said. “For its purity. I loved a girl named Copper Shay, Abo girl, poorest girl I ever knew, and I loved her all the more for it. When I think about Copper I think of choices I could have made that would have put me back in Freo with Copper and four or five kids, and I bet I would have been happy. But that wasn’t how things worked out.”

“No,” Brenda said, and she was glad.

Another glass of wine and they were kissing. Their bar stools were practically on top of each other, and Walsh had his knees on either side of her legs. When he kissed her, his knees pressed her legs together, and Brenda couldn’t help thinking about sex. At the end of the bar there was laughter, some sneaky applause, and Brenda thought,
Everyone is watching us,
but when she looked up, no one was doing anything but drinking and minding their own business, except the man with the handlebar mustache, who winked and raised a glass in their direction.

“You’re not thinking of Erik now, are you?” Walsh asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

At quarter to one, Walsh switched to water. He had a rugby game in the morning at Van Cortlandt Park, he said. Did she want to come watch?

“I can’t,” she said. She was swimming in four glasses of wine, plus the drinks she’d imbibed earlier in the evening to blur the image of marriage-material non-eating Noel, and now, in this dark bar with the sexy jazz playing, she was a hostage to some very new feelings. She liked this guy,
really
liked him. The one man in Manhattan who was off-limits . . . and here they were.

“Okay,” she said, pulling away, disentangling, trying to orient herself with her bag, her cell phone, her keys, some money for the bill, her coat. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” said Walsh, yawning. He gave the waiter the high sign and a credit card slip arrived. Walsh, somehow, had already paid.

“Thank you,” she said. “You salvaged my night.”

“No worries.” He kissed her.

She touched his ears, she ruffled his very short hair. She was melting away with desire. She wanted to hear his accent vibrate against her chest—but enough! He had rugby and she had . . .