Barefoot: A Novel

him, she thought. So embarrassing to admit, but true. I like him. I love him. This is ridiculous! Melanie cracked the eggs into the pan, where they sizzled. There was no noise behind her and she was afraid to turn around. Let him wonder what was wrong. Let him guess. Melanie salted her eggs and tried to flip them but failed. She was making a mess.

She dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. The room was silent and Melanie figured the boys had slipped out or retreated to the safety of the bedroom, but when she turned around to check, the three of them were sitting at the kitchen table, watching her.

“What?” she said. “Aren’t you going to the beach?”

“In a little while,” Josh said.

“These eggs are for me,” Melanie said. “If you want to make your own breakfast when I’m finished, be my guest.”

“I’m al set,” Josh said. “If you’re eating, you must be feeling better.”

“I do feel better,” Melanie said. She buttered the toast and slid the jumbled egg mess on top, then sat down.

“You seem real y angry,” Josh said. “Is it your husband?”

“No,” Melanie said. “For once, it’s not my husband.”

“Is it anything you want to talk about?” Josh asked.

She glanced up from her plate. He was looking at her very intently. He was looking at her the way she wanted him to look at her, or maybe she was just imagining this. Those green eyes. Porter was working his pacifier, his head resting against Josh’s chest. Melanie had hoped that because Josh was young, he would be different. He wouldn’t have taken for granted, yet, his power over women. But clearly he understood it. He knew al of Peter Patchen’s tricks and then some. It came with the territory of being handsome and strong and accomplished and, no doubt, spoiled by his mother. Any which way, he was showing what could only be described as undivided interest in Melanie for the first time ever, when less than an hour before, he’d been kissing Brenda. Was this some kind of parlor game—seduce al the women at Number Eleven Shel Street? Would Vicki be next?

“I have to pee,” Blaine announced. He looked to Josh, as if for permission, and Josh nodded, his eyes stil trained on Melanie. Blaine left the table.

Melanie cut into her eggs; the yolks weren’t as runny as she’d hoped. “I saw you kissing Brenda,” she said.

Josh hissed like a bal oon losing air and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “She kissed me, actual y.”

“It didn’t look terribly one-sided,” Melanie said.

“I thought maybe she meant something by it,” he said. “But she didn’t. She was just feeling desperate, you know, about Vicki, and she wanted my help.” He shifted Porter in his arms and brushed his lips against the top of Porter’s head. Melanie ate her eggs and toast. She couldn’t bear to hear any more, and yet she had to know.

“Help how?”

“Talk to Vicki. Get her to go to chemo. Which I did, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if I did anything, but she went.”

Melanie nodded. The bereft, third-wheel, left-out feeling returned. There were dramas taking place al over this house that she didn’t even know about. “So, what about Brenda?”

“Wel , she’s in love with someone else,” Josh said. “Some student of hers back in New York.”

“John Walsh,” Melanie said. She took another, more lustful bite of her eggs. Her anger and confusion were starting to clear. Melanie heard the toilet flush and Blaine cal ed out for Josh. He smiled and stood up.

“So . . . whatever. It’s no big deal. She digs somebody else. I mean . . . wel , you know how it is.”

“Yes,” Melanie said. “I do.”

PART TWO

JULY

Brenda had been on Nantucket for more than three ful weeks, and she had gotten nowhere on the damned screenplay. Day after day she left the house by nine o’clock for the beach, and she settled on her deserted stretch of sand with a thermos of coffee and her yel ow legal pad. She knew the story of The Innocent Impostor so intimately it was as if she had written it herself. The book would make a great movie if she could get it right. It was an undiscovered classic with lots of drama and an ambiguous moral message. Brenda could keep it period, cast John Malkovich as Calvin Dare and dress him in fril y lace-col ared shirts and a wig. Or maybe she should modernize it: turn Calvin Dare into a Jersey City construction worker who accidental y kil s Thomas Beech with his Datsun 300ZX while backing out of a parking space at Shea Stadium after a Bruce Springsteen concert—and who then, through some careful y constructed coincidences, takes over for Beech on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs and starts dating Beech’s fiancee, Emily, who manages the Kate Spade store in Soho. Brenda could visualize the movie as a huge critical and commercial success either way. She even had a tenuous connection in the “business”—her former student Amy Feldman’s father, who was the president of Marquee Films.

But she couldn’t write.

Al her life, Brenda had been easily distracted. To work, she needed solitude and absolute quiet. Her parents had arranged for this in high school

—El en Lyndon turned off the classical music she played on a Bose radio in the kitchen, she turned off the ringer on the phone, she al owed Brenda to skip dinner in order to study in the strictly silent reserve room of the Bryn Mawr Col ege library. And then, in col ege and graduate school, Brenda sought out places where no one would ever discover her so she could have long, uninterrupted hours of reading and writing. She dead-bolted her apartment door and pul ed her shades. One year for Christmas Vicki gave her a sign to hang from her door: Do Not Disturb: Genius at work. This was al very tongue in cheek; Vicki was the last person who understood single-mindedness. She had been born a multitasker before such a talent even had a name. But Brenda couldn’t think about two things at once, much less four or five things, and therein lay her problem. How was she