Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  The girl ignored Brenda, which was fine. But when Brenda stepped out of the stal herself a few minutes later, the girl was stil there, eyeing Brenda in the mirror.

  “Hey,” the girl said. “I know you. Josh works for you.”

  Brenda looked at the girl more closely. Of course. A push-up bra peeked out from the scoop neck of the girl’s white T-shirt, and then there was the streaky blusher. It was the little vixen from Admitting. Brenda eyed the name tag. Didi. Ah, yes.

  “That’s right,” Brenda said. “I’m Brenda. I forgot that you knew Josh.”

  “Damn right I know him.”

  Brenda washed her hands and reached for a paper towel. Didi rummaged through her bag and pul ed out a cigarette, which she proceeded to light up.

  “We real y like Josh,” Brenda said. “He does a great job with the kids.”

  “You pay him a fuckload of money,” Didi said. This sounded like an accusation.

  “I don’t know about that,” Brenda said. “I’m not in charge of paying him.”

  “Have you slept with him?”

  Brenda turned to Didi just as Didi blew a stream of smoke from her mouth. Brenda hoped her face conveyed her disgust, combined with the fact that she was too dignified to answer such an absurd question. But Brenda couldn’t help remembering the kiss on the front lawn. Certainly Josh hadn’t told anyone about that?

  “You’re not supposed to be smoking in here,” Brenda said. “It’s a hospital. Some people have lung cancer.”

  Didi curled her lip into a snarl, and Brenda was overcome with the feeling that she had somehow reverted back to high school—she was trapped in the girls’ bathroom with a rebel ious smoker who was threatening her.

  “You’re fucking Josh,” Didi said. “Admit it. Or maybe it’s your sister who’s fucking him.”

  “That’s it,” Brenda said. She whipped her wadded-up paper towel into the trash can. “I’m out of here. Good-bye.”

  “He never would have turned me down if he wasn’t giving it to one of you,” Didi cal ed out as Brenda flew out the door. “I know it’s one of you!”

  Okay, Brenda thought. Weird. And weirder stil , Brenda was trembling. Wel , maybe it wasn’t so weird that she was rattled—after al , the worst moment of her life had shared certain elements with that little scene in the bathroom. A girl, young enough to be Brenda’s student, accusing her of improper relations.

  Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism.

  Romantic or sexual relationships are forbidden between a faculty member and a student. Romantic or sexual comments, gestures, or innuendo are forbidden between a faculty member and a student and will result in disciplinary action. There are no exceptions made for tenured professors.

  We understand, Dr. Lyndon, that you’ve been having improper relations with one of your students.

  The “improper relations” were Brenda’s fault. It would have been nice to blame Walsh for pursuing her, but ultimately Brenda was the professor and Walsh the student and Brenda had let it happen. There had been the drinks at the Cupping Room and the kissing—when Brenda woke up the fol owing morning she felt deeply ashamed and terrifical y energized. She thought perhaps John Walsh would cal her cel phone but he didn’t, and by Tuesday morning, she thought maybe she had imagined the whole thing. But in class Walsh sat in his usual seat, surrounded by lovely girl-women, al of whom now seemed to Brenda to be flaunting their bright intel igence like feather boas for his sake. Every time Amrita the brownnoser contributed to class discussion, she looked to Walsh right away, to see if he agreed with her point or not. And Kel y Moore, the soap opera actress, was even worse, with al of her theatrics aimed in his direction. The three Rebeccas had basical y formed a John Walsh Fan Club. He’s so hot, Brenda overheard one of the Rebeccas saying. Everybody wants him. Walsh, for his part, was disarmingly blasé. He had no idea that he was sitting in a classroom of adoring fans.

  At the end of class, Brenda handed out the topic of the midterm paper: Compare and contrast Calvin Dare’s identity crisis with an identity crisis of a character from contemporary literature, either on or off the reading list. Fifteen pages. The girls groaned and filed out. Walsh stayed put.

  Brenda looked up. “No,” she said. “Go. You have to go.”

  He stared at her in a way that made her sick with desire. He didn’t say a word; as Brenda remembered it, he didn’t say one thing. He just stood there, looking at her. Brenda was stupid with her longing for him—and, too, she was egotistical. The other girls—girls far younger and prettier than she—al wanted him, but she was the one who was going to get him. She scribbled her address down on a piece of paper and pressed it into his hand, then she ushered him toward the door.

  “Go,” she said. “I have to lock up.” She tilted her head. “Because of the painting.”

  He didn’t show up that night or the next night, and Brenda felt like an idiot. She thought maybe he was a double agent hired by the other professors in the English Department who, jealous about her top teaching marks and subsequent superstar status, were trying to frame her. She thought maybe this was an elaborate practical joke dreamed up by the girl-women in the class. On Thursday, she vowed not to look Walsh’s way, though of course she did, several times. Sandrine, the singer from Guadeloupe, had managed to sneak a can of Fresca, which she was resting on her thigh, past Mrs. Pencaldron’s drinks radar. Brenda asked her to please throw it away. Sandrine had risen, reluctantly, and murmured something in French that half of the girl-women laughed at. Brenda became furious, though she was cognizant of the fact that she was not furious with Sandrine, or even with Walsh, but rather, with herself. She was fretting about the piece of paper with her address on it. It was just a piece of paper, just her address—

  it didn’t mean anything—and yet, it did. Brenda had given Walsh her permission, she had given him her heart. This may have sounded ridiculous, but that was how she felt. She had pressed her heart into his palm and what had he done with it? Nothing. Walsh didn’t linger after class; he filed out the door behind miffed Sandrine and the rest of the girl-women, and Brenda was crushed.

  That night, Brenda was to meet Erik vanCott for dinner downtown at Craft. They were going alone, the two of them, without Noel, which should have made Brenda happy. Craft was a real restaurant, a New York– magazine type of restaurant. It had leather wal s and a bottleneck of people at the door. Everyone was dressed up, smel ing good, using important voices, talking on cel phones ( I’m here. Where are you? ), waiting to get in, in, in. Brenda stood on her tiptoes and tried to see over shoulders and around heads, but she couldn’t locate Erik. She stood in the general mass waiting to talk to the gorgeous woman at the podium (her name was Felicity; Brenda overheard someone else say it). Brenda worried that she had the wrong place or the wrong time or the wrong night, or that she’d dreamt the phone cal altogether. When final y it was Brenda’s turn to talk to Felicity, she said, “I’m meeting someone. Erik vanCott?”

  Felicity’s eyes flickered over her very important reservation sheet. “Here it is: vanCott,” Felicity said in a minor-league, how-about-that voice, as if she’d just found a dol ar on the sidewalk. “Mr. vanCott has not yet arrived and the table isn’t quite ready. Would you like to have a drink at the bar?”

  At the bar, Brenda downed two cosmos. Then Felicity announced that the table was ready, and Brenda decided to sit, despite the fact that she was alone. She ordered another cosmo from a waiter who also appeared to be a professional weight lifter.

  “I’m meeting someone,” Brenda told him, hoping this was true. She checked her cel phone for a message. Nothing. It was eight-thirty. She had official y been stood up by two men in one week. But then she looked up and saw Erik darting toward her from across the room, the tails of his Burberry raincoat flying. The boy who’d chased Brenda on the playground, who once ate a whole jar of pistachios in one sitting in El en Lyndon’s kitchen and then threw up in El en Lyndon’s powder roo
m, the lovelorn boy who had sung a Bryan Adams song at his prom after being ditched by Vicki, was now a man who made money, who wore suits, who met Brenda in snazzy New York restaurants.

  “Am I late?” he said.

  “No,” Brenda lied.

  “Good,” he said. He col apsed into the chair across from Brenda, shed his raincoat, loosened his tie, and ordered a bottle of wine in impeccable French.

  Brenda was dying to tel him the story of Walsh. There was no one else she could tel ; her life was devoid of close girlfriends, and she couldn’t tel Vicki and she couldn’t tel her mother. Plus, Erik would be able to give her a male perspective, plus Brenda wanted Erik to know that yes, she did have men in her life other than him. However, in the twenty mil ion years of their friendship, rules had developed, and one of those rules was that Brenda always asked about Erik first.

  “So,” she said, dipping into her third cosmo. “How’s everything?”

  “You mean Noel?”

  “We can talk about Noel if you want,” Brenda said, though, real y, she had hoped for a Noel-less evening.

  “I have something to tel you,” Erik said.

  We broke up, Brenda thought. If that was the case, she would talk about Noel al night. Good-bye to Noel, closure with Noel, and, of course, the requisite Noel-bashing.

  Erik pul ed a blue velvet box out of his suit jacket, and Brenda thought, He has a ring. For me? But even three cosmos didn’t alter reality that much.

  “I’m going to ask Noel to marry me,” Erik said.

  Brenda blinked. Marry him? She gazed at the box. She was sure the ring was lovely, but she didn’t ask to see it. She had no right to be surprised

  —Erik had warned her. He had cal ed Noel “marriage material.” But Noel had a flaw: She didn’t eat. A person who didn’t eat had a serious esteem problem, a self-image problem. Brenda had written Noel off at Café des Bruxel es, and she thought Erik had, too. Brenda was mute. If Erik knew how much Brenda loved him, he would have done her a favor and cal ed her on the phone so she could just hang up.

  “Bren?”

  “What?” Brenda said, and she started to cry.

  Erik reached across the table for her hand. He held it tight and stroked it with his other hand. The blue box sat on the table between them, unopened. Brenda heard whispers, and she realized that somehow she and Erik had attracted the attention of their neighboring diners—who thought, no doubt, that Erik was proposing to Brenda.

  “Put the ring away,” Brenda whispered. “Please.”

  Erik slid the box back into his pocket but he didn’t let go of Brenda’s hand. They had never actual y touched this way, and Brenda found it both breathtaking and exquisitely painful.

  “Are you happy for me?” Erik said.

  “Happy for you,” she said. “Unhappy for me.”

  “Brenda Lyndon.”

  She saw the weight lifter approaching their table, but she couldn’t deal with another minute of this date. She pushed away from the table. “I’m going.”

  “You’re walking out on me again?” Erik said. “Again, in the middle of dinner?” He started in with the awful David Soul song. “Don’t give up on us, baby. We’re still worth one . . . more try . . .”

  “That’s not going to work,” Brenda said.

  “Brenda,” Erik said, and Brenda looked at him.

  “What?”

  “I love her.”

  Brenda stood up and left Erik at the table. She was crying for many reasons, not least of al because true love always seemed to happen to other women—women like Vicki, women like Noel. Brenda could practical y see Noel, naked in Erik’s bed, which he had always fondly referred to as his nest. Noel was in the nest, naked, nesting, not eating. Alabaster skin, hair like a mink, naked except for pearl earrings. Ribs showing through her skin like the keys of a marimba that Erik could play while he sang. Brenda left the restaurant.

  “Eighty-second Street,” Brenda told the cab driver waiting outside of Craft, who was, of al things, American. Benny Taylor, the license said. “And do you have any tissues?”

  A smal package of Kleenex came through the Plexiglas shield. “Here you go, sweetheart.”

  Benny Taylor delivered Brenda to her apartment at ten minutes to ten.

  “Are you going to be okay, sweetheart?” Benny Taylor said.

  He was asking not because she was crying, but because there was a man lingering by the door of Brenda’s building. The man was tal and dressed entirely in black. Brenda squinted; her heart knocked around. It was John Walsh.

  “I’l be fine,” Brenda said. She tried to straighten her clothes and smooth her hair. Her makeup would be a wash. She pul ed money out of her purse for Benny Taylor and ransacked her brain for something to say when she got out of the cab. Hi? What are you doing here? Brenda’s ankles were weak, and the three drinks had taken custody of her sense of balance. Benny Taylor drove away; Brenda walked as steadily as she could toward Walsh, who was smiling. He was as dashing as the hero in an old Western. Strong, masculine, Australian. Brenda tried to be cool, but she found it impossible to wipe the stupid grin off her face.

  “Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  John Walsh became her lover. He was her lover for days, weeks, months. It was exhilarating, delicious, and a holy, guarded secret. They never spoke on university property except during class, and Walsh stopped hanging around afterward. He cal ed her cel phone—two rings then a hang-up was his signal—and they met at her apartment. If they couldn’t wait the forty-five minutes it would take to get across town, they met in Riverside Park, where they kissed behind a stand of trees. They hunkered down in Brenda’s apartment through one blizzard, eating scrambled eggs, drinking red wine, making love, watching old Australian movies, like Breaker Morant. John Walsh told Brenda things—about a girl he got pregnant in London who had an abortion, about his grandfather who worked in the interior of Western Australia shearing sheep. He told her about his travels around the world. Brenda talked about her life growing up in Pennsylvania, her parents, Vicki, summers in Nantucket with Aunt Liv, col ege, graduate school, Fleming Trainor. It was dul in comparison, but Walsh made her life seem fascinating. He asked the right questions, he listened to the answers, he was emotional y available and mature. What Brenda loved most about Walsh was his gravity. He wasn’t afraid of serious topics; he wasn’t afraid to look inside himself. Maybe that was how Australians were raised, or maybe it was because of his travels, but Brenda didn’t know another man like this. Even Erik, even Ted, even her father. Ask them to talk about their feelings and they looked at her like she was asking them to shop for tampons.

  During the second blizzard that winter, Brenda and Walsh bundled up so completely that no one would ever recognize them and they went sledding in Central Park. As the days passed, they got braver. They went to the movies (Brenda wore a basebal hat and sunglasses. She did not let Walsh hold her hand until the theater went dark). They went to dinner. They had drinks out, they went dancing. They never once saw anyone they knew.

  At some point along the way, Brenda stopped thinking of Walsh as her student. He was her lover. He was her friend. But then came the Monday night that changed everything. Brenda was home alone, grading the midterm papers. She had put this off for as long as possible, and the girl-women in the class had started to complain; Brenda had promised the class their papers back the fol owing morning and she had one paper yet to read. To his credit, Walsh hadn’t asked her about it. Possibly he’d forgotten it was her job to grade it. It was with great trepidation that she picked up the paper with their names typed together at the top— John Walsh / Dr. Brenda Lyndon—and read.

  What was she afraid of? She was afraid the paper would be bad—poorly organized, poorly argued, with typos and misspel ings and comma splices. She was scared he would write “different than” rather than “different from.” She was scared he would regurgitate what she’d said in class rather than think for himself (as one of the Rebeccas did, earning a
flat C); she was scared he would accidental y quote somebody without noting a source. The paper was a potential relationship-ender—not only because he might get angry at a lousy grade, but because Brenda would not be able to continue seeing him if she had any qualms about his intel igence.

  Nearly everyone else in the class chose to compare Calvin Dare to one of the characters from the books on their reading list. Not Walsh. He picked a book that wasn’t on the reading list, a book Brenda had never read, a novel cal ed The Riders by a Western Australian named Tim Winton. Walsh’s paper targeted what he cal ed the “identity of loss”—or how losing something or someone in one’s life caused a change in that person’s identity. In The Innocent Impostor, when Calvin Dare’s horse kil s Thomas Beech, Dare loses his confidence in his life path. The event shakes him to the core and causes him to relinquish his own dreams and ambitions and take up those of Beech. In The Riders, the main character, Scul y, has lost his wife—quite literal y lost her. She flies to Ireland with their daughter, but mysteriously, only the daughter gets off the plane. The Riders was a search for Scul y’s wife but it was also a study of how one man’s identity changes because of this loss. Brenda was riveted. Walsh presented his thesis statement clearly in the first three pages, he backed it up with ten pages of textual support from both novels, and he ended, bril iantly, by citing other instances of the identity of loss across a wide scope of literature. It could be found, Walsh said, everywhere from Huckleberry Finn to Beloved.

  Brenda put the paper down, stunned. For a point of reference, she reread Amrita’s paper (which she had given an A) and then she read Walsh’s paper again. Walsh’s paper was different, it was original, as fresh and sun-drenched as the country he came from, but with a depth that could only come with age and experience. She gave Walsh an A+. Then she worried. She was giving Walsh the highest grade in the class. Was that fair? His paper was the best. Could she prove it? It was a subjective judgment. Would anyone suspect? Was the A+ in any way related to the fact that John Walsh made love to his professor on this very couch, bringing her enough pleasure that she cried out?