“I have to pee,” Blaine announced. He looked to Josh, as if for permission, and Josh nodded, his eyes stil 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 bal oon losing air and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “She kissed me, actual y.”
“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 al over this house that she didn’t even know about. “So, what about Brenda?”
“Wel , 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 cal ed out for Josh. He smiled and stood up.
“So . . . whatever. It’s no big deal. She digs somebody else. I mean . . . wel , you know how it is.”
“Yes,” Melanie said. “I do.”
PART TWO
JULY
Brenda had been on Nantucket for more than three ful 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 yel ow 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 fril y lace-col ared shirts and a wig. Or maybe she should modernize it: turn Calvin Dare into a Jersey City construction worker who accidental y kil s 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 careful y 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.
Al her life, Brenda had been easily distracted. To work, she needed solitude and absolute quiet. Her parents had arranged for this in high school
—El en Lyndon turned off the classical music she played on a Bose radio in the kitchen, she turned off the ringer on the phone, she al owed Brenda to skip dinner in order to study in the strictly silent reserve room of the Bryn Mawr Col ege library. And then, in col ege 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 pul ed her shades. One year for Christmas Vicki gave her a sign to hang from her door: Do Not Disturb: Genius at work. This was al 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 al , 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 stil , 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 cal ed only once, right at the beginning, on the day that Blaine was lost and then found, when Melanie answered Brenda’s cel 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 cal s 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 cal and that was it. How typical y 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 sul ied, 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? Al of the girl-women in Brenda’s second-semester class had been in love with him—even Kel y Moore, the purple-haired soap opera actress, even Ivy, the lesbian, and especial y 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 yel ow 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 Bruxel es for moules et frites. Brenda hated Noel—she had always hated Erik’s girlfriends—but she especial y hated Noel because, according to Erik, Noel was “marriage material.” Erik had actual y 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 yel ow-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 al 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 real y knows how to eat.”
“Yeah, w
el ,” Brenda said. “You know me. Indiscriminate.”
A while later, the mussels arrived, with the fries. Noel made a face.
“You real y 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 wil 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 bril iant move or an unforgivably rude one. What would her mother think? At that moment, Brenda’s cel phone rang. John Walsh, the display said. She knew she should let the cal go to her voice mail—because what were the chances John Walsh was cal ing to ask about the syl abus? However, Brenda was reeling from Erik and Noel–caused anxiety. Her good sense splattered al 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 strol ed Walsh, looking so handsome that everyone at the bar stared at him, not least of al 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, wel , he was a lethal dose of something. Col ege 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 fel back. He caught her arm.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hel o.” 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 al owed 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 al the grim details up front,” Walsh said. “My mum has a rose garden and my dad final y 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.”
“Wil 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?”
“Cal me Dr. Lyndon. Do it again and I’l leave.”
He grinned. “Okay, then, Brenda.” He pronounced it “Brindah.” “Want a burger?”
“I’l 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. “Normal y 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 al 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 practical y 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, pul ing away, disentangling, trying to orient herself with her bag, her cel phone, her keys, some money for the bil , 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 . . .
“Cab?” Walsh said.
“I’l get my own,” Brenda said. “East Side, you know.”
“You sure? We can stil share.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, then.” Kiss, another kiss. Another, longer kiss. “I’l see you Tuesday. Brindah.”
“Tuesday?”
“In class.”
Brenda stood up from her beach towel; she felt dizzy. She walked toward the ocean. She had made no progress on the screenplay again today, and tomorrow was Friday, which meant taking Vicki to chemo, which meant Ted instead of Josh, which meant Brenda would be cal ed in as backup to watch the k
ids and keep the peace. She had agreed to these duties wholeheartedly. ( Repentance, she thought . Atonement. ) This weekend they had an excursion to Smith’s Point planned, complete with bonfire and boxed-up lobster dinners, in an attempt to get Vicki out of the cottage, to get her eating, to get her engaged in the summer and family life—and yet what this really meant was that no work got pursued again until Monday.
Brenda waded out past the first set of gently breaking waves and dove under. She wondered what the water felt like in Australia. Back at her towel, she scrol ed through the previous ten cal s to her cel phone, just in case Walsh had cal ed during her three-minute dip, just in case she had missed his number in the hundred other times she had checked her messages. No, nothing. Brenda had left her copy of The Innocent Impostor at home in the briefcase, where it would be safe from the sand and salt air, but if she closed her eyes, she could see the smeared note. Call John Walsh!
She would cal him; she would invite him to come to Nantucket. The beach, the swimming, the fresh air—he would love it here. Did Walsh like lobster? Probably. Being typical y Australian, he would eat anything (including, he used to tease Brenda, what he cal ed “bush tucker”—grubs, tree bark, snail eggs). But no sooner had Brenda punched the first four digits into her phone—1-212 ( I could be calling anyone in Manhattan, she thought)—than the second reel started spinning against her wil . The Crash. Brenda tried to block out the dominant image, but it came to her anyway. The Jackson Pol ock painting.
It had taken weeks for Brenda to discover the painting’s al ure, but then, in the days when she was fal ing in love with Walsh, she became entranced by it. She had a favorite blue line in the painting that ran like a vein from a massive black tangle. The blue was a strand of reason emerging from chaos. Or so she had thought.
Barefoot: A Novel Page 19
