Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  He checked on Porter—asleep. Josh felt jubilant as he flipped open his phone. So jubilant that he answered even though he could see on the display that it was Didi cal ing.

  “Hel o?” he whispered.

  There was loud, thumping music in the background. Then Didi’s voice, as pleasant and soothing as smashing glass. “Josh? Are you there? Are you coming to Zach’s? Josh?”

  Josh hung up the phone and closed his eyes.

  The story had been told so many times with such precise sameness that it no longer seemed true, and yet, it was true: Victoria Lyndon met Theodore Adler Stowe at a late-night high-stakes poker game.

  Vicki had been living in Manhattan for a little more than a year when she discovered the poker game. She’d harbored a vision of herself as a party girl—nothing was too late or too wild for her, she never ran out of gas—though the fact of the matter was, her weeks were consumed by work as a paralegal at an al -female law firm and her weekends fel into a postcol egiate pattern of dinner at cheap ethnic restaurants fol owed by drinks at a string of bars on the Upper East Side populated by extremely recent graduates of Duke, Princeton, Stanford, Wil iams. Vicki was ready for something different, something edgier, more authentical y New York, and so when a friend of a friend, a guy named Castor—who had long black hair and wore silver jewelry—invited her to a midnight poker game on the Bowery, she panted into the phone: Yes, yes, yes!

  The address Castor gave her had once been a brownstone, but the windows were blown out and boarded over, the door was pocked with bul et wounds, and the place exuded an aura of shithole. Okay, Vicki thought, he must be kidding. Or he’s trying to scare me. Or he’s trying to kil me.

  Because how wel , real y, did she know Castor? Or maybe she had the wrong address. Except he’d been very clear, and this was the place. Half a block down, music pumped out of CBGB, but despite that, Vicki clenched her rape whistle. She had thirty dol ars in the pocket of her leather pants, a lipstick, and her keys.

  Castor pushed open the door of the building from the inside. “Come on in,” he said.

  The building had smel ed like burning hair. The stairs were sticky with—blood? urine?—and Vicki heard the scuttling of rats.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “Upstairs,” he said. “Al the way up.”

  She fol owed Castor up the stairs, down a pitch-black hal way, up some more stairs, toward a door outlined with green light.

  “The color of money,” Castor said.

  They pushed into a cavernous room, decorated like a 1920s speakeasy. It was someone’s apartment—a little bald man named Doolie, who was, in fact, a squatter. He had transformed this room into the hottest poker game in the city. A three-piece jazz combo played in the corner.

  Juil iard students, Castor said. A bar was set up and a Rita Hayworth look-alike in a red flapper dress passed around fat corned-beef sandwiches.

  The center of the action was a round table that sat twelve, though half the seats were empty. It was a poker game, six men grimacing at one another.

  “It’s a hundred-dol ar ante,” Castor said. He handed Vicki a bil . “I’l spot you your first game.”

  “I can’t,” Vicki said. “I’l lose your money.”

  “You don’t know how to play?”

  “I know how to play.” There had been some beer poker at Duke and, years before that, funny games with her parents and Brenda at the kitchen table. About as different from this kind of poker as Vicki could imagine.

  “So play.” Castor nudged Vicki forward and she stumbled into one of the empty chairs. Only one of the men bothered to look up. A young guy with brown hair and dark green eyes. Preppy-looking. A kid who, much to Vicki’s dismay, looked like the hundreds of guys she met at the bars uptown.

  He was wearing a Dartmouth Lacrosse sweatshirt. Her first thought was, If someone as standard-issue as you found this place, it can’t be that hot. But the other men were older, with the definite air that they knew what they were doing.

  “You in the next hand?” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

  She set the hundred out on the table. “I guess.”

  The other men licked their chops. They wanted her money.

  She won the hand with three queens. The men pushed the pile of cash her way, chuckling. “Betty won.”

  “My name is Vicki,” she said.

  She played again and won with a ful house. Castor brought her a martini. Vicki took an exultant sip, then thought, This is where I get off. Two more women joined the game and Vicki stood up.

  “Oh, no,” one of the older men said. He was the hardest-looking and the loudest-laughing, the leader. “You sit your pretty bucket back down and let us win our money back.” She obeyed and won the third hand with a flush.

  Then it was her turn to deal. Her hands shook as she shuffled. She thought of Crazy Eights with Brenda and shuffled with a waterfal . The men chuckled some more. Betty. She folded the next two hands, then won a hand. She ate half a corned-beef sandwich and had another martini. It was three o’clock in the morning and she had never felt more awake. In four hours, she would have to go to work, but she didn’t care. Dartmouth Sweatshirt was smoking a Cohiba. Do you want one? he asked. Sure, why not? She lost another hand then got up to join Castor at the bar. The band was stil playing. Who were these people? Music and writing students, Castor said. Young Wal Street, young production designers, young Madison Avenue, young Seventh Avenue.

  “It’s who wil be running New York ten years from now.”

  Vicki didn’t belong there. She would never run New York; she couldn’t even make a decision about law school. And yet she walked out of the building at five o’clock in the morning with twelve hundred dol ars. Dartmouth Sweatshirt offered to walk her home; Castor was headed uptown to 120th Street, so Vicki had no choice but to agree. The streets were deserted and intimidating, and she had so much cash.

  “You played wel tonight,” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

  “Beginner’s luck.”

  “Coming next week?”

  “Maybe. Do you go every week?”

  “Every week. I like it. It’s different.”

  “Yes.” Vicki looked at the guy. Out of the speakeasy, he seemed tal er and more confident. He was very cute. Vicki sighed. The last thing she needed in her life was another guy. But she was grateful for the walk home. So many men were like Castor. Sorry, going uptown.

  “What’s your name?” Vicki asked.

  “Ted Stowe.”

  Vicki went to the poker game the fol owing Tuesday and the Tuesday after that. She didn’t tel anyone else about it. She had two thousand dol ars in cash in her sock drawer and Wednesdays at work she spent her lunch hour napping in the ladies’ room. But Vicki craved the poker game. Castor gave it up at the end of October. He was on to other things, but not Vicki. She learned to tip Doolie from her winnings before she left, and she learned never to use the bathroom because there were always people in there—people who couldn’t have cared less about poker and the pure high of gambling—doing drugs.

  Al Vicki had wanted in the world was her martini, her half a sandwich, her Cohiba, her hand of cards, the John Coltrane, and the green, glowing color of money. This, she thought, is what it must feel like to be a man.

  Ted was there every week, despite the fact that he was an awful card player. Some nights he didn’t win a single hand.

  “You suck, Stowe,” the leader said. Vicki had learned that the hard-looking man with the Bridge and Tunnel accent was Ted’s boss on the trading floor at Smith Barney. Ken Roxby, his name was.

  Ted was always good-natured, always even-tempered, even after losing five hundred dol ars in half an hour, even at four o’clock in the morning, even drunk.

  “I’l get you guys back at golf,” he said.

  One week, to her utter dismay, Vicki had a stomach virus and missed the poker game. Wednesday morning, her phone rang. Ted Stowe. “I won three hands last night.”

  “You did not.”
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  “I made money,” he said. “For the first time ever.”

  “And I missed it,” Vicki said.

  “And I missed you,” he said.

  Neither of them said anything for a second. Ted cleared his throat. “Hey, I was wondering if . . .”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You haven’t even let me ask.”

  “I don’t want to date anyone in the poker game,” she said. “I real y, real y like it and I want it to stay just the way it is.”

  “Okay,” Ted said. “I quit.”

  Vicki thought he meant he was quitting her, but no. He meant he was quitting the game.

  “You’d quit for me?” Vicki said.

  “Wel , you know what they say about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer,” he said. “It feels good when you stop.”

  Now, here it was, more than ten years later: Vicki was lying in bed, nursing a hangover. She wanted to blame the malaise she felt on the chemotherapy, but the symptoms were al too familiar—the floury mouth, the fuzzy, buzzing headache, the sour stomach. She begged Brenda to take the kids for an hour, and bring her a chocolate milk, and Brenda did so huffily.

  “I’m not actual y your slave,” Brenda said as she handed Vicki the milk.

  Vicki nearly used the word “freeloader,” which would have been like setting a match to hairspray, but at that moment the front screen door clapped shut. There was a shuffle, some heavy footsteps, and then Ted’s voice. “Where are my little monsters?”

  Vicki took a sip of her chocolate milk, then fel back into her covers. It was a little past nine; he must have gotten up at an ungodly hour to make the first boat. She listened to him horsing around with the kids. Ted Stowe, her husband. At another time, if she’d been separated from him for a week, she would have felt giddily excited about his arrival, nervous even. But now she felt the scary nothing.

  He didn’t come in to see her right away. He was busy with the kids first and then with al the stuff. Vicki had her eyes closed, but she tracked his presence, his footsteps on the flagstone path, the creak of the gate, the clicks and thumps of the car doors opening and closing. She heard him teasing Melanie, and indignation bloomed in Vicki’s chest: Your wife has cancer! You might take a few seconds to check on her and say hello! By now, Vicki felt good enough to get out of bed, but she would wait (childishly?) for him to come to her.

  When he did come, final y, it was al wrong. She knew it from the way he tapped on the door, from the tentative way he said her name. “Vicki?

  Vicki?” He never cal ed her Vicki, only Vick. He was afraid of her now; she was a stranger to him.

  And yet, they went through the motions. Ted knelt by the bed and kissed her forehead like she was a sick child. She pressed her face into his shirt and smel ed him. He had a strange smel that she hoped was just hotel soap.

  “How was the rest of the trip?” she said.

  He eyed the glass of chocolate milk. “Wel , I’m here.”

  He was there, yes, but in the weeks since Vicki’s diagnosis, Ted had changed. He had become Mister Rogers. His voice used to boom and resonate, but now he sounded timid and supplicant, and if Vicki wasn’t dreaming, he was getting fat. He had stopped going to the gym after work.

  She knew that with her and the kids gone, he worked late and either grabbed fast food from Grand Central or foraged through the freezer for one of the leftover casseroles. In the evenings he did onerous chores, things Vicki had been after him to do for years, like cleaning the attic. He did them now because he thought she was going to die. The day before Vicki left for Nantucket he threw away thousands of dol ars’ worth of Cuban cigars by ceremoniously breaking them in half over the kitchen trash. Really, Ted, Vicki had said. Is that necessary?

  Their sex life had come to a halt. Ted had taken to kissing her on the forehead and cheek; he hugged her like she was his sister. That afternoon, while Porter was napping, Brenda took Blaine to the beach with a wink and a nod so that Vicki and Ted could have some privacy. Ted closed the bedroom door and kissed Vicki in a way that let her know he was trying. They fel back on the bed, Vicki reached down his shorts, and . . . nothing.

  His body didn’t respond to her touch. For the first time in ten years, he could not get an erection.

  He pul ed away, sunk his face into the squishy mattress. “I’m tired,” he said. “I barely slept last night.”

  Vicki’s heart broke at this excuse. “It’s me,” she said.

  “No,” he said. He touched her lips. She was trying, too. She had risen from bed to put on lipstick, to put on perfume and a thong—al to try to disguise the fact that she was sick. The port alone was enough to turn any man off. She felt as sexy as a remote control, as desirable as a garage door opener. There was no pretending it didn’t matter. Her husband had shown up, yes, but something vital, it seemed, had been left behind.

  They fel asleep in the warm, stuffy bedroom and woke an hour later to Porter crying and the sounds of Brenda and Blaine playing Chutes and Ladders in the living room. They might have been tender with each other, apologetic—but instead, they started fighting. Ted took issue with the fact that Vicki had gone out the night before. “To the Club Car, no less.”

  “What’s wrong with the Club Car?” Vicki said.

  “Al those rich, divorced men on the prowl.”

  “No one was prowling after us, Ted. I promise you.”

  “And you got drunk,” he said.

  He had her there. She drank three or four glasses of wine at dinner, two flutes of Veuve Clicquot with dessert, and a glass of port at the bar. She had become utterly intoxicated, savoring the pure defiance of it. Her spirits lifted; she felt herself leaving her body behind. Dr. Garcia and Dr. Alcott had both told her no alcohol, but she felt so fantastic, she didn’t understand why. She had even wanted to go dancing at the Chicken Box, chug a few beers and lose herself further, but Melanie had groaned and yawned and Brenda sided with Melanie.

  It’s late, Brenda said. I think you’ve probably had enough.

  “I got drunk,” Vicki admitted. The chocolate milk, now soured and separated, was stil on her nightstand.

  “It was irresponsible,” he said.

  “You’re Blaine and Porter’s father,” Vicki said, rising from bed. She felt light-headed and nauseous. “You are not, however, my father.”

  “You’re sick, Vicki.”

  Vicki thought of the circle of human beings that comprised her cancer support group. They had warned her this would happen: You’ll become your cancer. It will own you, define you. That was true even within the group itself. Vicki knew the other members of the group only by first name, type of cancer, and stage. Maxine, breast, stage two; Jeremy, prostate, stage one; Alan, pancreatic (there was no stage with pancreatic, it was always terminal); Francesca, brain, stage two; and the leader, Dolores, Hodgkin’s, five years in remission.

  “So what?” Vicki, lung, stage two, said to her husband. “I’m an adult. I can do what I want. I wanted to have fun with my sister and Mel. Fun is al owed, you know. Even for people with cancer.”

  “You need to take care of yourself,” Ted said. “Have you been eating kale, or broccoli? I noticed you left your vitamins at home. Dr. Garcia said . .

  .”

  “You don’t know what this is like for me,” Vicki hissed. She marched into the other room, past Brenda and Blaine, to the kitchen counter, where she snatched up Porter’s bottle. It was amazing how as some things fel apart, others came together. Porter had taken a bottle the night before for Josh, and another one this morning for Vicki, just like that, without a peep. Vicki stormed back into the bedroom and closed the door. Ted was bouncing Porter around, trying to get him to stop crying.

  “Here’s his bottle.”

  “Wil he take it?”

  “He took one last night from Josh and another one this morning from me.”

  “Who’s Josh?”

  “The babysitter.”

  “A guy?”

  “A g
uy.”

  “What kind of guy?”

  “He’s going to be a senior at Middlebury. We met him at the airport the day we got here and now he’s our babysitter.”

  Ted sat down on the bed and started feeding Porter the bottle. “I don’t know how I feel about a male babysitter.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What kind of guy wants to babysit? Is he a pedophile?”

  “Do you honestly think I would hire someone like that? Josh is extremely normal. Athletic, handsome, trustworthy. He’s a dol , actual y.”

  “So you’re trying to replace me?”

  “Stop it, Ted.”

  “Was this Brenda’s idea?”

  “Wel , sort of. But please don’t . . .”

  “Ha!” he said. “I knew it. Your sister’s a pedophile.”

  “Ted, stop it!”

  “She’s going to have sex with the kids’ babysitter.”

  “Ted!” Strangely, Vicki felt jealous. Josh didn’t belong to Brenda! Last night when they got home, the three of them stood over Josh as he slept with Porter on the bed and they did everything shy of coo and cluck. Then Josh opened his eyes and startled—he was like Snow White waking up to the curious gazes of the dwarfs. Vicki had started to laugh, then Brenda laughed, then Melanie asked Josh if he wanted her to walk him out to his car and that made Vicki and Brenda laugh so hard they nearly peed themselves. Josh had seemed mildly offended, or perhaps just embarrassed that they had found him asleep, but he woke up enough to give Vicki a ful report and she was so happy about Porter taking a bottle that she gave Josh a hundred dol ars and good feelings were restored al around. She did not want to be attacked for hiring a male babysitter, and she did not like anyone’s insinuation that Josh was somehow around because of Brenda.

  “Just please be quiet,” Vicki said. She stopped herself from asking, Why did you even come?

  Later, when it cooled down a bit, they went for a walk. Get out of the house, Vicki thought. The house was so smal , the ceilings so low, that words and feelings got trapped, they ricocheted against the wal s and floors instead of floating away.