Barefoot: A Novel

“You’re punishing me for leaving Connecticut? You won’t have sex with me until I agree to come home?”

“That’s not it, Vick. That has nothing to do with it.”

“Wel , what’s wrong with you, then?” she said. She wanted to stand up, but she was too tired, so she remained on the floor, staring at Ted’s knees. Their sex life had always been healthy; before Vicki got sick, Ted had asked for her every night. That was how it worked—Ted asked, Vicki gave in. Never once had Ted failed to show up like this. It was so unusual, they didn’t even have the words to talk about it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

“You’ve slept with someone else,” Vicki said. “I know it.”

Ted sat up. He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t you ever say that again. Don’t say it and don’t think it. It’s insulting to me and to our marriage and to our family.” He pul ed on his swim trunks and started pacing the room. “Do you honestly think I would do that to you?” he said. “After ten years of being my wife, do you honestly give me so little credit? ”

Vicki started to cry. “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of what’s happening to my body. I’m ugly. I left you by yourself at home and I know you’re angry about that and I just have these awful thoughts about you screwing somebody else, of you fal ing in love with somebody else and the two of you waiting for me to die so that you can be together and raise the boys. . . .”

Ted knelt down. He held her face and she fel into him. She was overreacting, she knew it, but she was glad she had spoken because those were her fears. Sexual y, she felt like a failure. Having cancer felt like a failure, and what Vicki realized was that she wasn’t used to failing at anything.

Things had always come easily to her; that was part of who she was.

Ted was due to leave at five o’clock, giving Vicki another five days to fret about trying again.

“Wil you hold me?” Vicki asked.

Ted squeezed her tighter. “What do you think about trading in the Yukon?” he said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“We could buy a Volvo. It’s safer.”

Vicki shook her head. It was such a non sequitur she wasn’t even sure she’d heard him correctly. Could Ted real y be concerned about the car?

She forced herself to acknowledge the monstrous anger eating away at her. She couldn’t believe the things that mattered to other people! A safer car? Mixed in with her anger was envy. Vicki envied everybody everything: Melanie’s pregnancy, Brenda’s screenplay, Josh’s strong arms—he could carry the pack ’n’ play, the umbrel a, the towels, the cooler, and the baby and make it al the way to the beach without stopping or dropping anything. She envied Mamie her sons, al of them safely into teenagerhood; she envied Dr. Alcott the thirty-eight-inch striped bass that he decided to take home and gril for his family for dinner; she envied the tattoo on Amelia’s lower back (her tramp stamp, Ben cal ed it); she envied chatter about a missed fly bal . She envied Porter his pacifier—she wanted a pacifier! She envied Ted’s career, its demands and rewards; he would fly back to New York and consume himself with making money. That was his job! Vicki wanted her job back—housewife, mother. She wanted a normal life, a life fil ed with things other than chemo treatments and a darkened bedroom and a wistful, impotent husband. She wanted a life busy with things other than cancer.

Brian Delaney, Esquire, had cal ed nine times since Brenda had been on Nantucket, and Brenda had yet to return a single phone cal . She had hoped that dealing with the charges the university was slapping her with in regard to the Jackson Pol ock painting could be done via voice messages and e-mail, but Brian Delaney, Esquire, seemed intent on having a person-to-person chat on the phone at the cost of two hundred and fifty dol ars an hour. The reason, plain and simple, why Brenda didn’t want to talk to the man was that she didn’t want to pay. He must have sensed this. On the tenth cal , he said, Call me back or I’m dropping your case.

And so, once Brenda was safely away from the house, ensconced on a stretch of deserted beach that she’d discovered north of ’Sconset Bluff, she cal ed him back.

Brian Delaney, Esquire’s secretary, Trudi, put Brenda right through. Seconds later, Brian Delaney, Esquire’s voice boomed over the line, with as much unleashed testosterone as a linebacker from Ohio State, which was, in fact, what Brian Delaney had been in his previous life.

“Brenda Lyndon! I thought for sure you’d fled the country!”

She should have a snappy comeback for that, she knew. When she’d first met Brian Delaney, Esquire, she’d been ful of snappy comebacks, and that was one of the reasons he’d agreed to take her case. He liked her. It wasn’t just his Big Ten jock inferiority in the face of a near–Ivy League professor; he also liked the fact that she was young, attractive, and sassy. I can’t believe you’re a professor, he kept saying. Despite the damage done to her reputation by her relationship with Walsh, Brenda had worn a snug pencil skirt and very high heels to her initial meeting with Brian Delaney, Esquire, in the hope that he might cut her a break on his fee. No such luck—though Brenda seemed to be rewarded by his confidence.

This case was fun for him, it was a no-brainer. He was used to dealing with criminals, he said. Thieves, rapists, drug lords. Next to these people, Brenda looked like Queen Elizabeth.

“Nantucket is another country,” she said. “It feels like it, anyway. Sorry I haven’t cal ed you back. I told you about my sister, right? She’s going through chemotherapy? And I’m responsible for watching her kids? I’m very busy.”

“Right,” Brian said tentatively. Brenda had also thought that mentioning Vicki’s cancer might inspire him to lower his fees, but it was clear he didn’t remember what she was talking about. “Wel , I’ve been in contact with the university’s counsel, and she’s been talking to both the head of the Art Restoration Program and the chair of the English Department—because, as you know, it’s the English Department that technical y owns the painting—and they are coming at this from two different places. The art restoration guy, Len, his name is, says that only a smal amount of damage has been done to the painting. It just needs what he cal s ‘a little work.’”

“Thank God,” Brenda said.

“Wel , hold your horses there, sister. ‘A little work’ is going to cost you ten thousand dol ars.”