Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  She’d always hated the dark, cramped bachelor’s cave of a kitchen, which Lon had refused to renovate. With him gone seven years and a few twitches signaling restlessness from me, she’d seen her opportunity. “We’re ripping the whole freakin’ thing out. If it’s not a supporting wall, it goes. And I’ll introduce you to my appliance man.”

  Margo had a faucet man, a trim man, a grout man, a man for every job except, you know . . . Well, she had her husband for that, but she’d been whining about the quality of the service lately. Pete Manolis was courteous enough, and she used to brag that he was a master of technique, but he wasn’t showing up on time these days, and his performance was not as high-end as she expected from one of her experts.

  I’d let her go to town with her “refreshment,” as she called it, of the décor. With a few exceptions. As in, I’d never part with the kitchen table. Too many good memories. Family dinners, birthday parties. Lon had signed an unexpected contract for his last novel on its well-worn surface, chortling at the craziness of it all as he flourished “Henry London Farrell” on the last page.

  “I never thought this would happen,” he’d said. And, of course, as things turned out, it hadn’t. But who could have known back then? And we were delirious. Our seven-year-old, still in his jammies, wandered into the kitchen, and Lon swept him up and swung him high. “Daddy’s book is going to be published,” he exclaimed, which Jack, as the child of an author, understood was a big deal. “Yay!” he shouted. A minute later, we were dancing, hands linked, around the totem of our good luck.

  What did Margo say? Men plan; God laughs. Or smites. He’s an emotional All-Knowing. Not big on subtlety.

  As far as I was concerned, the table would stay through hell and high water. In spite of my loss of faith at the time, it wasn’t God’s fault Lon had died. It was mine.

  “Don’t frown like that; it makes lines,” Margo said, interrupting my reverie. She stared at me for longer than her customary attention span. “You could use a little refreshing yourself, Nora. You really do look like shit.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Kind of you to say.”

  “I’m not supposed to be kind. I’m your best friend. I’m supposed to be honest. You’ve got dark circles around the eyes. And they’re puffy. Not enough sleep? Hairy drive over the Bay Bridge? Something else, then, because you’re giving off fireworks of negative energy.” She peered at me questioningly. “Aunt Tillie hasn’t come to call, has she?”

  Margo’s coy euphemism was one her prude of a mother had used for menstruation. Margo took every chance she could to mock Paulette, a brilliant woman but one cut out to save lives, not raise them. I shook my head, trying to reflect on the absurdity of the question. I was forty-six. Aunt Tillie hadn’t paid a visit since before Christmas, and even then she’d only hung around for a weekend.

  “You’re obviously dragging.” Margo checked her Cartier watch. “You’re usually here by midafternoon. And you’re late because?”

  I explained that my Movement to Music session at Vintage House had given me my annual going-away party before I left for my three-month summer hiatus. I didn’t tell her that I’d been summoned to a surprise post-party meeting with the corporate administrator, which was what had screwed up my schedule.

  “Old people. So depressing,” Margo said. She had issues left over from childhood she kept reheating. Her narrow shoulders shuddered. “All those potbellies and liver spots. And the poor souls who can’t remember their own names. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “It’s what I was trained for. And I love doing it,” I said. What I didn’t say was that I might not be doing it for much longer. The decision hadn’t been made yet, but Kimberly Kline thought she ought to alert me to the possibility that my contract would not be renewed for the coming year.

  I’d swallowed hard against the first wave of panic. Vintage House was one of several Baltimore-area locations under the Vintage Health and Resource Inc. umbrella. I was a certified movement-and-dance therapist and my work at its nursing home and assisted-living residences provided my major income stream. The trickles—six hours a week working with patients at a private psychiatric hospital and a shift at the veterans’ medical center getting the healing wounded on their feet and moving smoothly—wouldn’t cover even the basics. As for We Got Rhythm, the dance school I ran in downtown Tuckahoe, I loved it, but it had been turning a profit, and not a big one, for only the last year. So losing the Vintage contract would be a catastrophe.

  “Both locations? House and Manor?” I’d asked Kimberly that morning.

  “Afraid so. It’s all about the bottom line. Mind you, the final decision hasn’t been made. It’s between you, art therapy, and twice-weekly meat on the menu.”

  Great. I’d be up against pottery and prime rib. Not a fair fight.

  “I’ll be pulling for you,” she promised. “I’m going to emphasize the health aspects of your work. How it prevents blood clots and depression. Maybe even staves off dementia. But just in case, since this is your last day on the premises before your summer break, I wanted to prepare you in person.”

  The budget would be released on July first, and either way she’d phone as soon as she knew something. “In the meantime, try not to worry.”

  She might as well have said, “Try not to breathe.” Slightly dizzy, I’d sucked up oxygen, a lungful that pierced the kind of pain under my ribs that I hadn’t felt since Lon’s death. I’d pressed spread fingers against it. And as I stood in my kitchen reliving the meeting, an echoing stab drew my hand to my chest. Margo stared at me. “You okay? Something’s definitely up.”

  I bit my lip to keep from saying what. If my actress friend got even a whiff of the possibility that Vintage might not pick up my contract, she’d have me weaving through Saratoga Street traffic holding a “Homeless—Hungry—Help” placard.

  When I didn’t answer, Margo twitched an eyebrow and switched tactics. “Well, in case you need to blur the edges, I tucked a bottle of merlot in the fridge. Not plonk, either. This is from Pete’s stock.”

  Pete had bought into a winery in Napa. His face—captured twenty years ago for a baseball card—beamed from the label.

  “I’d love to stay and have a glass and get to the bottom of whatever is bothering you.” Margo drew a quavering breath. “I’ve got my own troubles. Big ones. I’m at the point where I could really use your advice.” No, no staying. No bottoms. No advice in either direction. “But I’m afraid this visit’s a hit-and-run. Your fault. I thought we’d have more time except you were a slowpoke getting here, and I’m due at the theater, so not tonight. But we’ll talk.” Of course we would. We had since college. “Hopefully tomorrow. I need to sort this through.”

  She’d taken my hand. “You know you’re like the sister I never had,” she said, then ruined the moment by murmuring, “and, frankly, never wanted. My parents had little enough attention to spare on one kid, let alone more. But at this age, a sister is a good thing.”

  She patted my cheek and said, “Speaking of age, you’re getting a little hollow there. Nothing major, but you want to get ahead of the early signs of wear and tear. Women in their twenties are doing it now. Dr. Marx could take care of that in one appointment. Seriously, you might want to think about it. Pete’s been rambling on about some new business contact, last name Cassidy, single, very rich, very sharp. Could be a dating prospect. You know, it really is time for you to get back in the game. But you’re not thirty anymore and you need to do all you can to level the playing field.”

  That’s when I swiveled her around, placed my hand squarely on her back, and pushed her toward the door.

  “Sorry to leave you by your lonesome, darling,” she said as I opened it. Not lonesome. Alone. And, oh God, I wanted to be alone.

  I gave her a final shove onto the porch, closed the door, and leaned against it. I was home. My home. But the question loomed: For how long?
r />   chapter two

  That night, after a supper of bagels and smoked salmon, too much of Pete’s wine, and three hours of mind-candy TV, I wound my way through the house to the master bedroom. We’d had an unusually cold winter and a drenching spring in Baltimore, made more depressing by the solitary life I led, with Jack away for his freshman year at Duke. But as I forced myself to walk slowly, taking inventory of the treasures and pleasures of the house, I felt the lush joy of summer begin to seep into my soul.

  The great room stopped me with its beauty. After she’d redone the kitchen and I’d fallen in love with its whitewashed cabinets and the reproduction of a happy painting of Coney Island that her tile expert had fashioned into a backsplash, I’d let her go full tilt on redoing the living room. Her original vision had been for all white, but I’d protested it was going to look sterile, so she’d added pops of color. A chair in lemon yellow. An orange-striped chaise. A wall gallery of seascapes and photographs of local birds and wildflowers. With his permission and to his delight, she’d appropriated Jack’s collection of artifacts he’d found on the beach over the years—strangely beautiful shells and stunning coral, some old coins and an antique spoon he was sure had washed up from a shipwreck—and artfully arranged them atop a driftwood-based coffee table. Picture frames, odd boxes, and what she called tchotchkes in gold, silver, and the copper shade of my hair added just the right touch of sparkle. On the August afternoon that she’d pronounced it finished, we had stood back to take it in, leaned against each other (as we’d been doing one way or another for decades), and cried, each in her own way. Margo had stifled sobs, sniffed, and blotted with a real lace-edged handkerchief. I’d nodded and let the tears roll silently.

  “It’s beautiful. Perfect,” I’d rasped when I managed to dig up my voice. “I love it. Lon would have loved . . .”

  She’d held up a hand that halted the sentence and the sentiment. Lon had been evicted from the room. And to be honest, he probably would have hated it. Too cheerful and distracting for a serious novelist who’d struggled with writer’s block toward the end.

  Margo had also wanted to tackle his office, which she’d disparagingly called “the shrine.”

  The dancer in me had balked. My girlfriend had my rhythm all wrong. She wanted me to merengue into the future. Lots of quick steps and no looking back. For me it was two steps forward, one reverse, and an occasional glance over the shoulder.

  She’d trailed a finger over the desk and displayed her gray fingertip. “At least let the cleaning service dust in here. The room looks like it’s covered with the poor man’s ashes. Really, Nora, it’s unhealthy emotionally and physically.”

  So the dust shifted, but I made sure nothing else did. All was as Lon had left it before he’d headed to San Francisco and never come back. All was as it would be.

  I saw as I entered the lavender master bedroom that the cleaning service had been by earlier in the day to get the house ready for our arrival. A silver-wrapped chocolate kiss had been left on my pillow, Meryem Haydar’s personal touch. Merry worked for Clean on Board whenever school was out—and when she wasn’t giving her mother grief by getting into some kind of trouble. Emine, my friend and off-season manager at We Got Rhythm, worried endlessly about her fifteen-year-old rebel, but I thought that behind Merry’s pink-tipped spiked hair, the eyebrow ring, the fake tattoos, the fresh mouth, the curfew breaking and smoking on the sly, the tantrums at home, the bad behavior at school, the acting up and acting out, there was a kid with a good heart.

  Merry had left the balcony window open to let the sea air freshen the room. I moved to it and slid back the sheers to allow the moonlight to flood in. And maybe thoughts of Lon.

  The first time he’d wafted through that window was a week after his memorial service. Dressed in his favorite seersucker suit and striped bow tie, he’d stood silently—for a minute? an hour?—before blowing me a kiss and evaporating. A few nights later, he’d wakened me by stroking my back from his perch on my—our bed. That rattled me so hard I’d called a shrink friend at Poplar Grove, the psychiatric hospital where I worked part-time. Was I losing it?

  “You were probably in that fugue state between sleep and wakefulness where the mind plays tricks,” Josh Zimmerman had calmly stated. “You needed comfort—it gave you comfort. The literature is full of such benign hallucinations. These self-designed spirits take off when they’re no longer relevant. Not to worry.”

  My husband’s silent apparition dropped in three more times. On the last visit he wore his ratty tartan robe and scuffed slippers. There had been no command performance since, so maybe he’d been absorbed into eternity, which made me sad. Though sometimes I caught the unmistakable scent of the aftershave he’d said smelled like California at dawn—woodsy-citrusy.

  Tonight I was hoping for a visit or at least a little telepathic advice about what to do if the financial roof at Vintage caved in. Lon had been one of that rare breed, a writer with his feet on the ground. I was the dancer who stepped on her own toes moving forward. I said a prayer in my best New York accent to Saint Anthony, finder of lost things. “Yo, Tony! Looking for Lon down here.” And when that didn’t work, I sent out a personal invitation. “So come on in already, sweetheart.”

  I imagined Henry London Farrell riding the fragrant sea breeze from the balcony to the bed, where I lay against two pillows, drifting, drifting.

  A strong draft of night air suddenly whipped through the window, perfuming the room with beach plum and wild lilac and turning the white sheers to dancing ghosts.

  But they were the only ghosts. Lon was a no-show.

  Our son was conceived in that airy master bedroom. Or at least the idea for him was hatched there during a night of moonlit marital passion. As Lon rolled me to my knees, the preferred position for success according to a handout from my gynecologist, he whispered from behind me, “I want us to have a baby.”

  “I know, my love,” I said. But I’d known that far too long. Through a year and a half of tests, promising surgeries, and disappointing outcomes. Through the mea culpas or, as Lon put it, “It’s not youa—it’s mea culpa.”

  It was him.

  His confidence was already at a low ebb, sapped by the experience with Banshee River. Initial sales had been strong, but as the reviews came in (“Disappointing second act.”—The New Yorker), they dropped precipitously. He was struggling with his third novel, Wild Mountain, when the doctors’ grim report came in.

  “Abnormal sperm motility and morphology” was the medical term for a lethal combination that defied the best efforts of science to correct. Lousy swimmers, was Lon’s diagnosis.

  “I’m fucking sterile in every way. Well, the hell with the little buggers. We’ll find a way.”

  On that night, on that bed, as he lifted my hair to nuzzle my neck, he’d murmured, “You’re going to have our baby, I promise you. You’re going to get pregnant and have morning sickness and throw up on my Harris Tweed jacket. You’re going to get waddlingly fat and weighed down with a pair of double D knockers, and you’ll need to pee all the time and knit booties or whatever it is they knit these days. And at the end, you’ll pop out a redheaded girl or a blue-eyed boy, smart and funny and a royal pain in the ass, just like Mom.”

  “Ah, you say the most romantic things. Tell me more,” I shot back, and heard his gruff laugh go lusty as he growled from behind, “Show, not tell. The writer’s credo,” and we made the kind of frenzied love that under normal circumstances would have, should have produced something more than sweaty sheets.

  Afterward, with me nestled in the crook of his arm, as our breathing slowed, we stared at the filmy curtains billowing in the light breeze, thinking the same thing, I was sure. Wonderful sex but fruitless, in the truest biological sense of the word.

  After a few minutes, I felt him gently shift me aside. Before Lon had given up cigarettes because smoking inhibited sperm production, this woul
d have been the moment he’d flick on the bedside light and rummage in the night table drawer for his pack of Marlboros. Now he extracted a clipped sheaf of papers. “Take a look at these,” he said. “You floated using a sperm bank as an option a while back and I wasn’t all that receptive. But you know me; ideas have to churn. I’ve been thinking about it and I decided to follow up. Did a little research. Made a few calls. Stopped by to pick up some printouts.” He glanced at me, his eyes registering concern that he might have overstepped some female-drawn invisible boundary. “Just a possibility. No pressure.”

  As he handed over the papers, he said, “The quality of the donors is surprisingly impressive. Three look particularly good. But check out number 1659. I really like the sound of him.”

  I read aloud, “‘Six feet two inches. One hundred seventy-five pounds.’ Your build. ‘Ethnic background: Dutch.’”

  “Close enough,” Lon said. “Irish, Dutch, same continent.”

  “‘Skin: light. Hair: dark blond. Eyes: Hazel. Religion: Protestant slash agnostic.’ Whatever that means.” As a cafeteria Catholic, who was I to judge?

  Lon read over my shoulder, “‘Likes hiking and fishing.’ That’s a match. ‘Enjoys Beethoven.’ A man of good taste. Bonus: he’s a medical student, on his way to a noble profession, unlike mine. And he’s an Open ID Donor. That means when the kid’s eighteen, number 1659’s willing to meet with the product of his . . . uh . . . ten minutes with a Penthouse magazine in a small white room.”