Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Like a thunderbolt Brenda recal ed overhearing Amy Feldman talking to Walsh about sushi, a place cal ed Uni in the Vil age that absolutely no one knows about, that was undiscovered and completely authentic. Just like the sushi they have on Asakusa Road in Tokyo.

  You’ve been to Tokyo? Walsh, fel ow world traveler, had asked.

  I was with my father, Amy said, in a voice that was meant to impress. On location.

  Amy Feldman, quite possibly, had been in love with Walsh, too.

  Three rings, four rings, five rings. Brenda wondered if she was cal ing Amy Feldman’s apartment or her cel phone. If she got voice mail, would she leave a message? A message was too hard to ignore, Brenda decided; Brenda wanted to connect with Amy Feldman in person.

  “Yes?”

  Someone answered! The voice was male, older, and overly pleasant, as if to say, in the nicest possible way, Why am I answering the phone at two o’clock in the morning?

  “Hi,” Brenda said, in what she hoped was a sprightly voice, to let this person know that she was neither drunk nor an obscene cal er. “Is Amy there?”

  “Amy?” the man said. Then, in a curious voice to someone else, he asked, “Is Amy here?” The other voice, female, murmured a response. The man said, “Yes. She’s here, but she’s sleeping.”

  “Right,” Brenda said. Hold it together, Brenda thought. This was not Amy Feldman’s cel phone, nor was it her apartment (insofar as Brenda meant “apartment”: some col ege dive with roommates, laundry in the basement, and a hot plate). This was Amy Feldman’s home number, her family home, probably some extremely fine pad overlooking Central Park. Amy Feldman lives at home, Brenda thought. And I am now talking to her father, Ron Feldman.

  Ron Feldman said, “Would you like me to leave Amy a message?” Again, his voice was so pleasant that there was no possibility he was sincere.

  “This is Brenda Lyndon cal ing,” Brenda said. She was speaking very quietly because she didn’t want to wake up anybody in the cottage. “Doctor Lyndon? I was Amy’s professor last semester at Champion.”

  “Ohhhh-kay,” Ron Feldman said. “Do I have to write this down or can you cal back in the morning?” It was clear he would prefer the latter, but Brenda was as shameless as a telemarketer. She had to keep him on the phone!

  “Would you mind terribly writing it down?” she asked.

  “Al right,” he said. “Let me find a pen.” To his wife, he said, “Hon, a pen. It’s a professor of Amy’s from Champion . . . I have no goddamned idea why.” To Brenda he said, “What’s your name again?”

  “Brenda Lyndon. Lyndon with a y. ”

  “Brenda Lyndon,” Ron Feldman repeated. The voice in the background raised an octave. Ron Feldman said, “What? Okay, wait. Honey, wait.” To Brenda, he said, “I’m going to put you on hold for one second. Is that al right?”

  “Al right,” Brenda said.

  The line went silent, and Brenda kicked herself. She was a complete idiot. She had decided, only seconds before making this phone cal , that she wasn’t going to leave a message, and here she was leaving a message. And this was the one and only time she would be able to cal ; she couldn’t stalk the Feldman household.

  The line clicked. Ron Feldman said, “Are you there? Dr. Lyndon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the one who got in al the trouble?” he said. “With the student from Australia? You’re the one who nicked up the original Jackson Pol ock?”

  At that second, a light went on in one of the cottages that backed up to Number Eleven Shel Street. In the newly brightened window, Brenda saw the face of a woman her mother’s age who appeared to be throwing back some pil s and drinking water. Aspirin? Brenda thought.

  Antidepressants? Pil s for arthritis? High blood pressure? Osteoporosis? When you peered into the windows of someone else’s life, you could only guess what was going on.

  “Wel ,” Brenda said. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “We heard al about you,” Ron Feldman said. “Or my wife did, anyway. Amy told us you were a good teacher, though. She liked your class. She liked that book you taught.”

  “The Innocent Impostor?” Brenda said.

  “The Innocent Impostor, hon?” Ron Feldman said. “Um, we can’t remember the name, neither of us had ever heard of it. Anyway, Dr. Lyndon, it’s late, but we wil pass on to Amy . . .”

  “Because that’s why I’m cal ing.”

  “What is?”

  “The Innocent Impostor, the book Amy liked, the book you’ve never heard of. I turned it into a screenplay. I have it right here in front of me, as an adapted screenplay.”

  “Waaaaaaaait a minute,” Ron Feldman said. “Are you . . . ?” He laughed, but he no longer sounded overly pleasant or polite; he sounded suspicious, verging on angry. “Did you cal here to pitch me?”

  “Ummmmm . . . ,” Brenda said.

  “You cal here in the middle of the night pretending to look for Amy when real y you want to pitch me your screenplay?”

  “No, no, I . . .”

  “I’ve had people do it a hundred different ways. They leave the script with the maître d’ at Gotham, because that’s where I eat, or they bribe my doorman or my driver—or hel , they get jobs as my doorman or my driver just so they can get a script in my hands. I am not surprised to find that you, a recently fired Champion professor, have a screenplay, because everyone on God’s green earth has a screenplay, including my periodontist’s nephew, including my secretary’s brother who’s currently doing time in Sing Sing. But this is total y fucked-up. This is like nothing else. You . . . caught me with my guard down. Me! How did you get this number?”

  “Your daughter gave it to me,” Brenda said.

  “Dandy,” he said. “Dan-dee.”

  “You said she liked the book, right?” Brenda said.

  He paused. “What’s the name of the goddamned book?”

  “The Innocent Impostor. ”

  “There’s your first problem right there. You have to change the title. No one wants to see a movie about an innocent anything.”

  “Change the title? ” Brenda said.

  There was more yammering in the background. “Okay, right, yes. I stand corrected. My wife makes a point about The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese, nominated for an Oscar. Fine, okay, fine. Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead, what?”

  “Pitch it. I’l give you thirty seconds. Go!”

  “Uh, wel ,” Brenda said, thinking, Speak! She knew the book inside and out; it was her passion, her baby. “It’s a period piece, seventeen hundreds, this man, Calvin Dare, our protagonist, is tying up his horse in front of a tavern and there’s lightning and his horse startles and kicks this other man, Thomas Beech, in the head and kil s him.”

  “I’m practical y asleep.”

  “So then the first man, Calvin Dare, goes through this process where he becomes Thomas Beech. He takes Beech’s job, he marries Beech’s fiancée, he lives Beech’s life for him, basical y, and sheds his own identity so that he can become Beech. Because Beech’s life was better than his, maybe. Or . . . because he feels guilty about kil ing Beech.”

  “That’s it?” Ron Feldman said.

  “Wel , no, but you’d have to read . . .”

  “Thank you for cal ing, Dr. Lyndon.”

  “Can I send you . . .”

  “Here’s an idea: Write a screenplay about a professor who has sex with one of her students and then destroys mil ions of dol ars of university-owned art. We’re talking about smal release for sure, but that, at least, has half a story line. The other thing, no.”

  “No?”

  “Good night, Dr. Lyndon.”

  “Oh,” Brenda said. In the other cottage, the light went off. The woman disappeared from view. “Good night.”

  Josh was going to quit.

  There was only a week and a half of babysitting left anyway, and now that Ted was around, Vicki had cut back Josh’s hours nearly every day.

  Bring the ki
ds home early. We’re going to take them out to lunch. Drop them off at the casino. Ted is playing tennis. Josh heard talk about another evening picnic out at Smith’s Point but he had yet to be invited, and if they did invite him, he would say no. And yet, the fact that they didn’t invite him bothered him. Was Josh no longer “part of the family”? Were they through with him? Was he expendable? Wel , yeah, he’d have to be an idiot not to sense things coming to a close. After al , Vicki’s chemo was over, it had been successful, she was gearing up for her surgery, which would be in Connecticut. Brenda had finished her screenplay and was now consumed with printing it, nestling it into cardboard boxes, and sending it out, cold, to studios. And Ted was here for his vacation. So there was no reason to include Josh on the family outing; they probably thought it wise to cut Josh loose from the kids now, otherwise the separation would be too hard on them. That was al fine and wel , and yet Josh was hurt. He had been more a part of this family than anyone knew, because of Melanie. And yet, it was because of Melanie that Josh, ultimately, wanted to quit. He couldn’t stand to be around Melanie, just to see her was excruciating. She had cornered him once since the day of Peter’s visit. She’d begged him to meet her at the beach parking lot, she’d be waiting there as usual, ten o’clock. They needed closure, she said. Closure, Josh was pretty sure, meant a long, painful conversation as wel as, probably, some good-bye sex, and that would be akin to ripping the Band-Aid off the fresh wound in his heart and would set it bleeding al over again.

  Josh told Melanie no.

  He was going to quit. The story of his summer was over.

  When Josh walked into Number Eleven Shel Street with his resignation speech written in his mind, the house was silent. Ted, Melanie, and Brenda sat at the kitchen table, staring at one another. Through the screen door, Josh could see the kids in the backyard, rol ing a bal in the grass. This was highly unusual. Vicki didn’t like the boys hanging out in the backyard because she had found poisonous mushrooms along the fence line and the rosebushes attracted wasps. The front yard was much safer, according to Vicki, as long as they were always with an adult, which they always were. So out back, unsupervised—something was wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh said.

  The three of them looked up—Josh looked at Ted’s face and Brenda’s face, both of which communicated dire happenings. Josh could not look at Melanie. And where was Vicki? The door to her bedroom was closed.

  “It’s nothing,” Brenda said. “Vicki just has a headache.”

  “Oh,” Josh said. A headache? That was the cause of the dolorous communion around the table like the three of them were government officials of a country that was col apsing? A headache? For this the kids had been either punished or bribed with unsupervised time in the fraught-with-peril backyard?

  “She’s in a lot of pain,” Ted said. “She can’t tolerate the sunlight. She can’t stand the kids’ voices.”

  “Oh,” Josh said. “Did this just come about out of the blue?”

  “Out of the blue,” Ted said. “We cal ed Dr. Alcott for some pain pil s. He wants to see her.”

  “See her?” Josh said.

  “He wants to do an MRI,” Brenda said. “But Vicki, of course, refuses to go.”

  Melanie was silent. She was as marginal to this drama as Josh was. That was part of their connection, that was how they’d found each other in the first place—involved but not connected. Connected but not related. Melanie’s eyes were locked on him in a way that was almost impossible to ignore.

  “So . . . I should take the kids?” Josh said.

  “Please,” Ted said.

  “I’l go with you,” Melanie said. “To help.”

  “No, that’s al right,” Josh said. “We’l be okay.”

  “No, real y,” Melanie said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Wel , I . . . ,” Josh nearly said “do mind,” but he already had Ted and Brenda peering at him curiously. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Whatever.”

  As they ambled down Shel Street, Josh felt supremely self-conscious. He had walked this way dozens of times with Blaine and Porter—and yet with Melanie at his side, he felt like this was his family: Blaine and Porter his sons, Melanie his pregnant wife. The people they passed in front of the

  ’Sconset Market easily could have believed this was the case—and what was worse, Josh realized, was that a part of him wanted this to be the case. Part of him wanted to marry Melanie and have children with her. And yet, he was angry with her, he’d been hurt by her, and he resented the way she’d just insinuated herself into his routine with the boys, giving him no chance to protest or assert his control. Hence, he said very little. But that didn’t stop Melanie from blundering ahead.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  He met this with silence. He was happy to hear her say it, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Do you miss me?” she asked.

  “Melanie,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.”

  “I’m not going to do this al morning. This ‘I miss you, do you miss me’ thing. Why did you even come with us?”

  “I wanted to get out of the house. It was tense.”

  Josh eyed Blaine. Blaine was in one of his rare mel ow, reflective moods—Josh could tel he wasn’t listening with his usual acuity.

  “Is it serious?” Josh said. “The headache?”

  “It could be, I guess.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  They walked in silence al the way to the beach parking lot.

  “Do not run ahead,” Josh said to Blaine. “We’l al go together.”

  “I know,” Blaine said.

  Melanie sniffed. “I want you to meet me here tonight.”

  “No.”

  “It’s only for another week.”

  “I know, so what does it matter?”

  “It matters,” she said. “I want to be with you.”

  Josh looked at Blaine. His head seemed to be cocked at the perfect angle for listening; maybe this was Josh’s imagination, but Josh didn’t care.

  He shook his head at Melanie. Porter babbled in Josh’s ear.

  Later, when Blaine was playing two umbrel as down with Abby Brooks and Porter was halfway through his bottle on his way to la-la land, Melanie hoisted herself up out of the chair and plopped down next to Josh on his towel. He readied himself for another onslaught, but Melanie was quiet and as stil as a statue, and yet she was most definitely there; Josh could smel her hair and her skin. They sat side by side, staring at the ocean and the people in it, and it should have been tense, but surprisingly, it was okay. Coexisting, without touching or talking. Josh found himself afraid to move, afraid to break whatever spel had been temporarily cast over them. Maybe this was what Melanie meant by closure. It wasn’t the rapture he’d experienced al summer—the night at the Shimmo house came to mind, rol ing around with Melanie on those sheets, holding her close as they stood on the deck taking in the view—but it wasn’t bad or painful, either. He felt like he was suspended directly between the best minutes with Melanie and the worst, and there was something comforting in the neither-good-nor-bad of it. Ten days from today Josh would be beside his father in their Ford Explorer, driving back to Middlebury. He would see his friends, girls, people he hadn’t thought of in three months, and they would ask him, How was your summer? And al he knew for certain as he sat, sharing his towel with Melanie, was that there was no way he would ever be able to explain.

  First, there was the dream. Vicki couldn’t remember it completely. It was a surgery dream, the doctors were going to perform Vicki’s surgery right then and there and not on September first as they had planned. There was urgency, secrecy—somehow Vicki was told, or perhaps she discerned, that what they were removing from her lungs wasn’t tumors at al , but rather, precious jewels. Huge rubies, emeralds, amethysts, sapphires—the biggest in the world, right there inside Vicki’s chest, embedded in the healthy tissue of Vicki’
s lungs. The doctors weren’t doctors, they were thieves of some international acclaim; they were planning on doing the surgery, she learned, without any anesthetic. Vicki would die from the pain; they were planning on kil ing her.

  She woke up. Not with a start, like in the movies, not sitting straight up in bed gasping for breath, but quietly. She opened her eyes and felt tears on her cheeks. Ted was beside her, breathing like a man on vacation. With a crook of her neck, Vicki saw both her children asleep on the mattress on the floor. It hurt to breathe. Vicki wondered what the inside of her chest would look like after the surgery. Would there be a big hole where her lung used to be?

  The surgery, now that it was a reality, was newly terrifying. It has to be done, obviously, Dr. Garcia had said months ago. If you want to live.

  Funny how the surgery was what Vicki had wished for, it was the goal of the chemotherapy, and yet it frightened her beyond al comprehension. It made her insides twist, her pelvis tighten, it made her shoulders and wrists stiff with anxiety. The anesthesia alone was nearly impossible to come to grips with. She would be out, way out, for more than six hours. It was different from sleep, she understood that. It was forced unconsciousness, a place between sleep and death. Vicki would be kept there, in that purgatory of nothingness, while they cut through her chest muscles, spread open her rib cage, col apsed her lung, and then removed it. It was worse than a horror movie. A hundred things could go wrong during the surgery and a hundred things could go wrong with the anesthesia. What if the surgery was a success but they pushed her too far under with the anesthetic and she drowned in it? What if she crossed to the other side?

  She lay in bed, ticking like an overheated engine. Was it any wonder she couldn’t sleep? Was it any wonder she had nightmares?

  Next came the headache.

  When Vicki woke up in the morning she felt like she was wearing a lead helmet. There was not only pain, there was pressure. Blaine launched himself onto the bed as he did every morning when Ted was there—no need to worry about Mommy not feeling wel when Dad was around—and Porter whined to be lifted up. He was stil too little to climb. Vicki opened one eye. This wasn’t intentional; it seemed, for whatever reason, that she could only get one eye open. And even that took a Herculean effort. And it hurt—sunlight coming in around the edges of the shades hurt, and Porter’s whining hurt. She tried to extend a hand to the baby, thinking she might haul him up onto the mattress with one arm despite the fact that he weighed nearly twenty pounds, but she couldn’t sit up to get leverage. She couldn’t lift her head.