Barefoot: A Novel

sophomore. Ha! Brenda took a mouthful of wine, hoping it didn’t turn her teeth blue, and stood up.

He kissed her.

One of her heels slipped on something wet under the bar and she fel back. He caught her arm.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hel o.” He grinned. “I can’t believe you agreed to meet me.”

That made two of them.

“This is very bad,” Brenda said. “You’re my student. If anyone sees us . . .”

“We’re in Soho,” Walsh said. “It’s like another country.”

For the next three hours, Brenda decided to pretend this was true. She drank her wine and Walsh drank Tanqueray. At first, Walsh talked, which al owed Brenda to obsess. College sophomore, my student, what the fuck am I doing? He told Brenda about the town he came from in Western Australia. Fremantle. South Beach, the Cappuccino Strip, the seafood restaurants on the harbor, the weekend markets, the taste of a passion fruit while sitting under a Norfolk pine with the Fremantle Doctor sweeping in off the Indian Ocean. The waves at Cottesloe, a day of sailing on the Swan, the wine and cheese from Margaret River. His family lived in a hundred-year-old limestone-and-brick bungalow in South Fremantle: his mum and dad, his sister, a niece and nephew he had only seen in pictures. His sister’s partner, Eddie, lived there, too, though Eddie and the sister weren’t married and to make matters a bit more dickey—that was his word and Brenda couldn’t help grinning— Eddie was on the dole.

“Not to give you al the grim details up front,” Walsh said. “My mum has a rose garden and my dad final y joined the twenty-first and bought a digital camera, so he sends me pictures of the roses and the tots doddering among the roses.”

“Sounds lovely,” Brenda said. And it did.

“It’s paradise,” Walsh said. “But there was no way for me to know that until I left, only now that I’m here, it’s hard to get back.”

“Wil you go back?” Brenda asked.

“Either that or break my mum’s heart.”

The bartender appeared and Walsh ordered a burger. Did Dr. Lyndon want anything?

“Please don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Cal me Dr. Lyndon. Do it again and I’l leave.”

He grinned. “Okay, then, Brenda.” He pronounced it “Brindah.” “Want a burger?”

“I’l have a bite of yours, if that’s okay.”

“No worries. My burger is your burger.”

“I ate a little something earlier,” she said, and with that, she ordered another glass of wine.

“You were out?”

“I was out.” She told Walsh the short story of her aborted dinner with Erik and Noel, then the long story of Erik. “I’ve loved him since I was sixteen,”

Brenda said. “Normal y people grow up and move on. But not me.”

“I reckon love at sixteen is the best kind of love,” Walsh said. “For its purity. I loved a girl named Copper Shay, Abo girl, poorest girl I ever knew, and I loved her al the more for it. When I think about Copper I think of choices I could have made that would have put me back in Freo with Copper and four or five kids, and I bet I would have been happy. But that wasn’t how things worked out.”

“No,” Brenda said, and she was glad.

Another glass of wine and they were kissing. Their bar stools were practical y on top of each other, and Walsh had his knees on either side of her legs. When he kissed her, his knees pressed her legs together, and Brenda couldn’t help thinking about sex. At the end of the bar there was laughter, some sneaky applause, and Brenda thought, Everyone is watching us, but when she looked up, no one was doing anything but drinking and minding their own business, except the man with the handlebar mustache, who winked and raised a glass in their direction.

“You’re not thinking of Erik now, are you?” Walsh asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

At quarter to one, Walsh switched to water. He had a rugby game in the morning at Van Cortlandt Park, he said. Did she want to come watch?

“I can’t,” she said. She was swimming in four glasses of wine, plus the drinks she’d imbibed earlier in the evening to blur the image of marriage-material non-eating Noel, and now, in this dark bar with the sexy jazz playing, she was a hostage to some very new feelings. She liked this guy, really liked him. The one man in Manhattan who was off-limits . . . and here they were.

“Okay,” she said, pul ing away, disentangling, trying to orient herself with her bag, her cel phone, her keys, some money for the bil , her coat. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” said Walsh, yawning. He gave the waiter the high sign and a credit card slip arrived. Walsh, somehow, had already paid.

“Thank you,” she said. “You salvaged my night.”

“No worries.” He kissed her.