Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  There had been precedent in the then Yankee player’s affair with a stunning New York City TV sports reporter, a liaison that almost destroyed the Manolis marriage. Pete’s trade to the Orioles had ended that extramarital adventure, but the memory still haunted Margo.

  I leaned back in my chair and said with all the sincerity I could muster, “Go on.”

  “Okay. He hasn’t been himself for a while. Remember I mentioned I thought it was because of him hitting the big five-oh? But it’s become clear, especially here at the beach, where I can keep an eye on him all day, three days a week, that it’s much more serious.”

  I must have hoisted a skeptical eyebrow, because she added, nostrils flaring, “I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, there she goes again, Margo the drama queen. But I’ve got the goods. First, he’s on his cell phone almost constantly, whispering conversations, or he ducks into another room. Then, get this—Pete the Luddite is texting. The man doesn’t know how to forward an email and suddenly he’s tapping away with his Shrek-sized fingers on this tiny keyboard. When I asked him who taught him how to text, he told me Janet Buxbaum, the secretary at the Orioles’ front office.” The O’s front office was Pete’s home base for some kind of public relations job that Margo couldn’t exactly define.

  “So you think this Buxbaum person could be the girlfriend?” I asked.

  “She’d better not be. She’s pushing sixty, with kinky gray hair, and she stinks from the two packs a day she smokes. I will not accept that quality of competition.” When I gave a half laugh, she said, “I’m trying to make light of this, Norrie, but it’s no joke.” She paused for effect. “He bought new underwear.”

  Not good. But no need to panic either. “People do occasionally purchase replacement underwear, Margo. Even happily married ones.”

  “He switched from boxers to briefs.” Uh-oh. “I found these in the laundry basket this morning.” She reached down into her gym bag and pulled out, dear God, what looked like . . .

  “Black jockeys. So I checked his dresser drawer. Three pairs in black. Three in royal purple. What man wears royal purple briefs unless he thinks he’s got the king in his pants? And quite honestly, lately, it’s been just the oppo—”

  My hand flew up in deflection, signaling TMI, then waved at her to get that underwear out of my sight.

  In the East Village apartment Margo and I had shared in grad school, we’d talked about our dates in snorting, graphic detail. But when Lon and Pete came along, we stopped discussing the intimate particulars because in both cases we knew almost immediately that these men were for keeps and that kind of gossip seemed like a betrayal.

  “Black and purple,” I said. “Ravens’ colors. Pete’s a gung ho Ravens fan. And they had a great season. Maybe he’s just celebrating.”

  “He’s celebrating all right, but not with me. With her.”

  “Wait. Who’s her?”

  “I’m thinking some young thing, big boobs, a fan whose father probably collected Pete’s baseball cards. Don’t know her name yet, but I’ll find out. I have my ways. All I can tell you for sure is Pete the Cheat is at it again. He’s exhibiting the same symptoms as the first time. Almost. The texting is new.”

  “And when you asked him about the texting, the phone calls, he said what?”

  She flicked me a look that let me know I was the village idiot. “Oh, please. I haven’t asked him.”

  “Well, this may seem simple and therefore inconsistent with your script, but if you think something’s going on, why not?”

  “Because he’d be furious that I was going through his things the way I did in New York. And he’d deny it like he did before with that Alicia creature. Said I was insecure. I was imagining things. Like the charges for a St. Regis suite on our Visa card were a mirage. If I hadn’t confronted him with that, he never would have come clean. I take care of all the bills now. Nothing so far, but they probably do it at her place.”

  “Pete adores you. I can’t imagine after all the counseling—”

  “You know what Peter Manolis adores? He adores being adored. Do you remember the Yankee Hanky-Pankies? That’s what he called the women who mailed him their thongs. And what about the groupies who followed him from game to game, even out of town? He laughed about all that drooling over him, but the truth is, he reveled in it.”

  She dropped her head to her chest as if some master puppeteer had let go of the string. Then, after a whimper, she raised it slowly to tell me, “Look, I’m his wife. I love him. God knows, I wish I loved him less. But I know too much to adore him. I see his dribble on the pillow. I get boomed awake when he’s forgotten to take his Gas-X. And men like Pete, the stars, they become raptors, with the fans feeding their egos. When the adoration runs out, they crave it. And now, after a famine longer than in the Bible, he’s got fresh meat. What’s tastier than that?”

  A genuine look of pain swept across her face. Under the Botox, the collagen fillers, the plumped-up, pulled-tight skin, she looked stripped down to herself. And scared. She said in a whisper, “The thing is, even after all these years and what we’ve been through, I don’t want to lose him.”

  I stretched my arm across the desk to squeeze her hand. She leaned in to meet me halfway, surveyed Carmella’s chaotic landscape, and thought better of it. She checked her watch. “I’ve got to get home. The caterers are coming for a final consult. Pete wants to change the menu. Add more fish and veggies. And that’s another thing; he’s switched from steak to fish. He used to hate fish. But these days everything has to have omega-3 fatty oils. He’s getting himself in shape for her.”

  She pulled a tissue from a box half buried on my desk and dabbed her eyes.

  “Oh, Margo,” I said. “Sweetie. This is all still speculation. Very premature. Don’t do this to yourself.” Which was all she really needed from me, a little sympathy.

  She gave me a wan smile. Then her eyes lit. “Come to dinner. Pete’s grilling salmon and, believe it or not, veggie kebabs.” Evidence on a skewer.

  Under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine a less attractive invitation. “Sounds wonderful,” I fibbed, “but it’s my first full day here, and you know what? I just want to let the beach seep in. Plus, Jack brought two bags of dirty laundry back from Durham so I thought I’d do a few loads and surprise him with some clean clothes.”

  “Jack. Damn, that reminds me. Pete sent Jack a new team T-shirt he wants him to wear Sunday.” The softball game on the lawn of their summer house was a highlight of the Manolises’ annual cookout. “I left the freaking shirt in the car. Walk with me and I’ll hand it over.”

  I was leaving anyway. And I felt she needed me. She hadn’t since her crisis back in New York, and she’d been there for me more recently, more times. Now it was my turn.

  Margo kept up rare-for-her nervous chatter all the way to her car, a pious Prius, though there was a Mercedes in the garage and Pete’s red Porsche convertible, which we’d thought was his midlife crisis.

  “Listen,” I interrupted, as she beeped her door remote, “you know Pete’s a good man. And he was so contrite the last time. The marriage counseling worked. It held for eighteen years. I suggest that before you go running off—”

  “Don’t you dare say half-cocked,” Margo shot back. But she’d made herself giggle.

  At that moment, her iPhone rang. The tent people. She leaned against one of the old beech trees that cast pools of cool shade on King Charles Street. To pass the time, I picked up a copy of the morning’s Coast Post that someone had tossed toward the trash bin and missed. While Margo talked, I unfolded the paper to get a second look at the We Got Rhythm ad with the five-year-old photo of me. My girlfriend peered over my shoulder, mouthed, “Neck,” and fluttered the back of her hand under my chin like an evil moth. “Dr. Marx,” she formed with her plumped lips.

  I inched away against the smooth bark before turning back a few page
s, but Margo’s antennae were out and quivering and she spotted the two-column photo.

  “Scott Goddard,” she mouthed, her nostrils flaring an exclamation.

  That had her speeding through the rest of her conversation. After she clicked off, she swiped the newspaper from me, stared, and let out a long whistle followed by, “Wow! I haven’t heard about him since the Goddards took your ballroom class. The wounded warrior leading the parade. Your heart goes out. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yup,” was all I said. Maybe that would end the conversation. As if.

  “But the wife, ugh,” Margo powered on. “Bunnicula. Now, there’s a woman who can suck the life out of a room. How did he wind up with her? Okay, I suppose she’s pretty in a clichéd kind of way. Yeah, I can see him falling for her back in high school before her prom queen looks faded. Voted girl most likely to give a blow job in the backseat. Every teenage boy’s dream. But imagine thirty years of living with that witch with a capital B. Scott Goddard deserves better.”

  That’s how I felt, but I averted my eyes. Margo knew me much too well.

  After she slid behind the wheel and handed over the Blue Herons T-shirt for Jack, Margo said, “Do me a favor, will you? At the party, play private eye with Pete. You love the big cheater so you’re an impartial witness. Watch his moves and tell me if I’m being paranoid about the girl-on-the-side thing. Oh God, I want to be paranoid.”

  She took off and I began walking in the opposite direction, the T-shirt crammed into my Vera Bradley bag. I wasn’t looking forward to the combination of Jack and Father’s Day. The holiday hadn’t been easy for him over the last eight years. This one, with #1659 hovering on the horizon, was extra complicated. Then there was Pete texting in closets. And afternoon thunderstorms predicted.

  Right, Sunday was going to be fun.

  chapter seven

  Friday had been hot. Saturday was steaming. It was one of those days you wanted to camp in with the air-conditioning turned up high, but at the Surf Avenue house we were awake and out early. We both had errands to do. Jack left for his first dog walk of the day, whistling, still high on the possibility that #1659 was out there somewhere jumping for joy over the possibility of connecting with his bio boy. For Jack’s sake, I hoped Dr. Who was doing just that. For my sake, well, I wasn’t so sure.

  By nine, I was looking over the produce at the farmers’ market, trying to stay cool under a wide-brimmed straw hat with every curl tucked in. My auburn hair was a legacy from my father’s gene pool. These days my copper tone was helped out by a colorist. But the sun was hell on dyed red and I’d be damned if I’d let my hundred-buck investment go orange.

  “Well, I do declare, Miss Scarlett, all you need is the parasol,” drawled Peg Lanahan, after we’d hugged hello. Peg operated Farmer Joe’s produce stand. I’d known Peg and Joe since my first summer in Tuckahoe. They were good, solid people.

  Peg tipped a quart basket of strawberries toward me and tumbled a few of the plumpest into my palm. “These beauties were picked this morning.”

  I savored them and nodded, confirming sweet and juicy.

  “I’ll take two baskets. How are your blueberries today?”

  “Good, maybe not as sweet as later in the season, but cooked with sugar for your Father’s Day cobbler, they’ll be fine.”

  She knew the destiny of the fruit I was buying, the reason I was out in this heat. I needed the best of her berries for the one tradition I was sure Jack would never scoff at. On birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, the honoree had the privilege of choosing dessert. Lon’s rice pudding, his mother’s recipe, which he cooked slowly on top of the range, was what I’d always asked for. Jack chose packaged Berger cookies, a Baltimore specialty, with swirls of chocolate frosting half an inch tall. Lon had wanted my summer fruit cobbler in June and then again for his August birthday, with the addition of peaches at the luscious height of their season. When the Manolises began holding their Father’s Day cookout in the afternoon, so that we all came home too late and stuffed for dinner, we moved the cobbler to the night before.

  I thought Jack might find it creepy to keep up the Father’s Day ritual without his dad, but he’d been good with it. “Hey, any excuse for pie” was his motto. So I’d bake the dessert this afternoon and he could have some when he finished his shift at Coneheads. Last year, when I got to the kitchen the following morning, I’d seen that he’d scooped up nearly half the cobbler before heading to bed.

  Peg said, “The cucumbers are in. And the Swiss chard and most of the greens. The lettuce is pretty.”

  “Cucumbers,” I said. “Two, please.”

  “How’s life treating you?” she asked as she sorted through the produce.

  “Happy to be back here. We had a snowy winter in Baltimore. You?”

  “Record cold here. My nephew, the four-year-old, got the bronchitis that went around in December. But the doctor gave him some new medicine and he bounced back in a snap. Amazing what science can do these days. They’ve got a little girl who had a heart transplant at the organ-donor booth this year. She’s going great guns.”

  The farmers’ market gave free space to all kinds of nonprofits and charities. You could register as an organ donor at the Red Cross tent, drink green tea at Hug the Trees, and pick up samples of crab seasoning at the Save the Bay Foundation station.

  Peg was focused on her calculator so she could avert her eyes when she asked, too casually, “And you? How’s your bounce?”

  “Just the standard speed bumps. I love my work.”

  I was hoping to sidestep questions about my nonexistent love life.

  A few years before, Peg had fixed me up with her cousin. Don lived in a condo near my Charles Village house, and we had a lot in common, she’d promised. He liked sushi; I liked sushi. His wife had walked out on him. My husband had left me. Not voluntarily, of course, but wasn’t the fallout almost the same?

  I’d tried. Don and I had gone out twice. It wasn’t awful and he wasn’t awful, just ordinary, which sounds horribly condescending, but the poor man had an impossible act to follow.

  “Jack’s good?” Peg asked.

  “Great. He made dean’s list. He’s back at Coneheads and doing his dog walking.”

  Enough information for our kind of friendship.

  “Have you seen the corn?” Peg asked. “We had a lot of rain this spring and the first crop is in early.”

  She pointed to a bin at the very end of her awning. I wandered over to a pile of Sunglow. Their fragrance was sugary, their husks a healthy green, their tassels palest yellow.

  I’d just begun stripping them halfway down, looking for kernels in soldier rows, when a dog’s bark, sharp and loud, raised my head. Big dog, I thought, before I saw a massive German Shepherd prowling five aisles up.

  “Sarge,” a voice commanded. The leash tightened and I followed the taut trail of the strap. The funny thing was, I knew who was at the other end before I saw his face. I don’t think the voice gave him away. The last time I’d heard it had been two years before, and never snapping an order. What I remembered were his frustrated groans when he took a beat or two to catch up with the music. And his triumphant laugh when he’d conquered a new boundary, like mastering a running turn in the meringue.

  Scott Goddard had put on a little weight and grown out his buzz cut so his dark hair, salted with gray, was fuller. But if I’d had any doubts as to his identity, which I didn’t, he was wearing camo pants and an “Army Proud” T-shirt. I felt my heart accelerate slightly, absurdly. I sucked in a breath of heavy, humid air. Exiting, it vibrated. Idiot! If I were any more the teenager, I would have broken out in acne on the spot. It was just the shock of seeing him after so long, I told myself.

  Still, against my will, I stared at the man as if he were something juicy in season. Which he was definitely not. Though I did notice that Bunnicula—Bunny, I guiltily self-correct
ed—was not at his side.

  He’d been bagging string beans, but now he rested the bag on the wooden bin and looked at me.

  I smiled. It was just a hi to someone you’d only walk over to if he smiled in return and waved beckoningly at you. Scott smiled and nodded, but there was not even a twitch of beckoning. No come-hither wave or head bob to signal he was eager for a let’s-catch-up-we-haven’t-seen-each-other-in-two-years conversation. He went back to picking through string beans.

  Odd, but not off-the-charts strange if Bunny was around. She hadn’t liked me. I’d rubbed her the wrong way with my demos of fancy steps that she couldn’t and (she’d literally dug in her heels) wouldn’t follow. So maybe Scott was acting like an ass to keep the peace with his wife.

  I scanned the shoulder of the road, where she might have skulked off for a cigarette. Ran a quick check of the nearby stalls. Nope, no sign of the evil Bunny. When I turned back, there was Scott walking toward me, the German Shepherd trotting by his side. It had been a while since I’d last seen the man, and the air was rippling with heat and so it could have been a mirage. But the lurch of my heart told me it was the real thing. That and the dog’s gruff bark.

  “It is you,” Scott said as they pulled up next to me. “For a moment there, I didn’t recognize you with your hair all—what would you call it?—tucked in. I’m used to you with your hair down. The reddish color.”

  Typical man-speak. Reddish.

  I swept off the straw hat so vigorously that its pink satin ribbon whipped me in the face.

  He laughed. “You okay?” I nodded yes and shook out my hair. Copper curls tumbled over my shoulders. Okay, so I was hair-proud. It was my best feature.