Elin Hilderbrand - Barefoot - A Novel

“Oh.”

“The kids. My sister. Her friend. And I’m not sure we even have any tea, so . . .”

“That’s al right,” Josh said, backing away. He was disappointed, but also relieved.

“Another time,” Brenda said. “You promise you’l come back another time? Now you know where we live!”

Melanie would never complain out loud, not with her best friend so gravely il , but she felt like mold on the wal at a fleabag motel. Here, then, was a classic case of Be Careful What You Wish For. Her breasts felt like lead bal oons. They hurt so much she couldn’t sleep on her stomach, and yet that was her favorite position for sleep, facedown, without so much as a pil ow. Now she had to contend with new sleeping quarters, a sagging twin bed in this strange, sunny room that smel ed like artificial pine trees.

Al she had wanted was to get away—as far away as possible. When she was in Connecticut, facing the utter wasteland her life had become, moving to Pluto had seemed too close. But now she was at loose ends; from a distance, things somehow looked worse than they did when she was standing in the middle of them. And the bizarre, unfathomable fact was, she missed Peter.

Peter, Melanie’s husband of six years, was very tal for an Asian man. Tal , broad in the shoulders, startlingly handsome—people on the streets of Manhattan occasional y mistook him for the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Melanie had met Peter at a bar on the East Side. Peter, at that time, had worked on Wal Street, but shortly after he and Melanie married he became a market analyst at Rutter, Higgens, where he met Ted Stowe, Vicki’s husband. Vicki and Ted were expecting their first child; they were moving to Darien. Melanie and Vicki became good, fast friends, and soon Melanie was pestering Peter about moving to Connecticut, too. (“Pestering” was how Peter described it now. At the time, to Melanie, it had seemed like a mutual decision to move.) Melanie wanted children. She and Peter started trying—nothing happened. But Melanie had fal en in love with a house, not to mention the green-grass-and-garden vision of her life in Connecticut. They moved and became the only young couple in Darien without children. At times, Melanie blamed her fertility problems on the suburb. Babies were everywhere. Melanie was forced to watch the strol er brigade on its way to the school bus stop each morning. She was confronted by children wherever she turned—at the Stop & Shop, at the packed day care of her gym, at the annual Christmas pageant of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.

You’re so lucky, the mothers would say to Melanie. You’re free to do whatever you want. You can sit through dinner and a bottle of wine at Chuck’s without sixteen hundred interruptions, without all the silverware and half the dinner rolls ending up on the floor, without the waitstaff glaring at you like you’re something stuck to the bottom of a mortician’s shoe. The mothers were kind; they pretended to envy Melanie. But she knew that they pitied her, that she had become a woman defined by her faulty biology. Never mind that Melanie had graduated from Sarah Lawrence, that she had taught English to the hil tribes of northern Thailand after col ege; never mind that Melanie was an avid gardener and a dedicated power walker. When the other women saw her, they thought: That’s the woman who’s trying to conceive. The one who’s having difficulty.

Barren, maybe. Something’s wrong, poor thing.

Peter didn’t acknowledge any of this, and Melanie knew now, in the post-breakup where deep, dark secrets oozed out like sludge from the sewer, that he’d never cared whether they conceived or not. (No wonder she’d had such trouble! Everyone knew the game was 90 percent attitude, positive thinking, visualization.) Peter had tried to make her happy, and the best way he knew to do this, being a man, was to spend money on her in flabbergasting ways. Weekend trips to Cabo, the Connaught in London, the Delano in South Beach. An Yves Saint Laurent velvet blazer that had a two-month waiting list. A twelve-ounce black truffle flown in from Italy in a wooden box packed with straw. Orchids every Friday.

As the months of infertility dragged on, Melanie immersed herself in starting seeds, digging beds, planting shrubs and perennials, mulching, weeding, spending nearly a thousand dol ars on annuals and herbs and heirloom tomato plants. She let the two beautiful little girls who lived next door cut her tulips and hyacinths for their May baskets. She fed her hydrangea bushes clam necks from the fish market. A Saint Bernard would have been easier to take care of than the damn garden, Peter complained.

Peter had told Melanie about his affair with Frances Digitt on the way home from the Memorial Day picnic that Rutter, Higgens threw every year in Central Park. There were softbal , hamburgers and hot dogs, watermelon, egg-in-a-spoon races and water bal oons for the kids. It was a nice event, but Melanie had suffered through it. She and Peter had tried in vitro seven times with no results, and they had decided not to pursue any more treatment. It just wasn’t working. But stil people asked, “Any news?” and Melanie was forced to say, “We’ve let it go, for the time being.” Ted and Vicki had not attended the picnic at al because Vicki had just gotten her diagnosis confirmed with a second opinion from Mount Sinai and she didn’t feel up to seeing anybody. So Melanie fielded inquiries not only about her infertility but about Vicki’s cancer as wel . With the number of people pursuing Melanie and pinning her down in conversation, it would have been easier to hold a press conference.

On the way home, Melanie mentioned to Peter that the afternoon had worn her down, she hadn’t had much fun, probably because Ted and Vicki weren’t there.

“Life is too short,” Melanie said. She said this every time she thought of Vicki now. Peter nodded distractedly; Melanie intoned this sentiment so often, its meaning was diluted. But Melanie meant the words urgently: Life was too short to fritter away in a constant state of yearning, aching, wanting. Waiting for something to happen.

At Exit 1 on I-95, they hit traffic and Peter cursed and they slowed to a crawl.

Now’s the time, Melanie thought. And she said, “I think we should try again. Once more.”

She steeled herself for his reaction. He hadn’t wanted to pursue in vitro at al . There was something about it that felt forced to Peter, unnatural.

Melanie had pushed the issue not once, not twice, but seven times, promising that each round would be the last. And then, a few weeks ago, she had real y, real y promised; she and Peter had made a pact of sorts, sealing it with their first spontaneous lovemaking in nearly a year. Afterward, Peter talked about a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, just the two of them. They would stay at a resort that didn’t al ow children.

Melanie was ready for Peter to be annoyed that she was revisiting the topic yet again; she was ready for anger. But Peter just shook his head, and with his eyes on the bumper of the car in front of them, he said, “I’m involved with someone else.”

It took Melanie a moment to understand what he meant by “involved,” but even after the obvious occurred to her, she stil wasn’t sure. “Involved?”

she said.

“Yes. With Frances.”

“Frances?” Melanie said. She looked at Peter. He had drunk several beers at the picnic. Was he impaired? Should he even be driving?

Because what he was saying didn’t make any sense. “You’re involved with Frances? Frances Digitt?” Melanie could only picture Frances as she had just seen her—in a pair of red nylon running shorts and a white T-shirt that said Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can . Frances Digitt was twenty-seven years old, she had a butch haircut, she was into al these extreme sports, like rock climbing and backcountry skiing. She had hit a home run during the softbal game and she ran the bases pumping her fist in the air like a sixteen-year-old boy. “You’re having an affair with Frances?”