Barefoot (16 page)

“Okay,” Melanie said. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Vicki said.

“Sure she does,” Brenda said.

Vicki set her fork down. All around them, people were having lovely dinners, pleasant conversation—was it too much to ask to be one of them, if only for tonight? “I want champagne with dessert,” she said.

“Oh, Vick, are you sure?” Brenda said.

As Vicki flagged their waiter, Brenda’s phone rang.

“You should turn that off,” Vicki said.

Brenda checked the display.

“Ted?” Vicki said.

“John Walsh?” Melanie said. And then in a heartbreakingly earnest voice, “Peter?”

“Nope,” Brenda said. “It’s Mom.”

“Oh, God,” Vicki said. “Turn it off.”

Somehow, Josh got Blaine’s face cleaned up (the scratch was microscopic; Vicki might not even have noticed it had Blaine not insisted on the largest Band-Aid in the box). Blaine, patched up and abashed by his own antics, calmed down. Porter was still wailing, however, and Josh was at a loss as to how to make him stop.

“Give him a bottle,” Blaine said. “He won’t take it, but Mom says we have to keep trying.”

Josh lifted the bottle out of the pan of hot water, tested the milk against the inside of his wrist like he’d seen it done in that movie where three grown men who don’t know anything about babies are left in charge of one, and then tried, with Porter nestled in the crook of his arm, to feed it to him. No such luck. The baby was too heavy to hold that way and he didn’t want the bottle. He threw it to the ground and shrieked with his lips curled back so that Josh could see all the way down his throat. Blaine looked on with mild interest.

“Does he always do this?” Josh asked.

“Yes,” Blaine said. “But Mom says we have to keep trying.”

“Okay,” Josh said. He sensed Blaine warming up to him, although he dared not become too optimistic. He held Porter in one arm and the bottle in the opposite hand, just out of Porter’s reach, hoping to entice him. Blaine, meanwhile, trudged back to the bedroom, where he unplugged the DVD player, pulled out the cord, wound it around his hand, shut the cover, retrieved the broken piece from under the bed, and set the whole thing on his mother’s dresser. He was like a little adult, Josh thought. Then Blaine grabbed a pillow and a blanket and three storybooks and left the room without so much as a glance at Josh, though Josh understood he was supposed to follow.

They moved into the bathroom, where Blaine brushed his teeth, took a leak (he was too short to reach the pull chain to flush, so Josh helped him out), and climbed, like it was second nature, with his pillow, blanket, and the three books, into the bathtub. He made himself comfortable.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Sit,” Blaine said. He held up
Horton Hatches the Egg
. “Read to me, please.”

Josh sat and the baby sat. The baby was just as baffled as Josh, perhaps, because he quieted. Josh set the bottle on the closed toilet seat. He opened the book, cleared his throat, and started to read.

A few minutes later, Josh thought,
Yes, that’s right. I am Horton the Elephant, sitting on an egg for lazy Mayzie bird who flew off to Palm Beach. If anyone at Zach’s party could see me now, they would taunt and tease and torture me as surely as the other animals in the jungle taunted Horton. I am that unlikely. That well-meaning but misplaced. I am not competent. This is not easy money. I was led here by lust for the mermaid and a crazy sense that the Three and I were somehow connected. I am a fool, an idiot. I quit the airport. How dumb I am. Horton.

And yet, before Josh had finished the book, peace settled over the bathroom. Blaine, in the tub, had fallen asleep. Porter, lying on his side on the cool tiles, was sucking down his bottle. It was too good to be true. He drained the bottle, then crawled over to Josh. Josh picked him up and he burped.

“Good boy,” Josh said. “Good baby.”

Josh changed Porter’s diaper in the bedroom. The diaper was crooked, but it was on the right way and Porter seemed comfortable enough. Somewhere in the folds of the covers, Porter discovered his pacifier. He popped it in his mouth and kicked contentedly.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” Josh asked. He could have sworn he saw the baby nod. It was barely dark out, but Josh was exhausted. Those beers. He took off his shoes and climbed onto the bed next to Porter. Porter grabbed his ear. Whose bed was this? Josh wondered, though he knew it was Vicki’s bed. The cancer bed. Josh thought about Brenda’s bed and Melanie’s bed. Then his cell phone rang.

He checked on Porter—asleep. Josh felt jubilant as he flipped open his phone. So jubilant that he answered even though he could see on the display that it was Didi calling.

“Hello?” he whispered.

There was loud, thumping music in the background. Then Didi’s voice, as pleasant and soothing as smashing glass. “Josh? Are you there? Are you coming to Zach’s? Josh?”

Josh hung up the phone and closed his eyes.

The story had been told so many times with such precise sameness that it no longer seemed true, and yet, it
was
true: Victoria Lyndon met Theodore Adler Stowe at a late-night high-stakes poker game.

Vicki had been living in Manhattan for a little more than a year when she discovered the poker game. She’d harbored a vision of herself as a party girl—nothing was too late or too wild for her, she never ran out of gas—though the fact of the matter was, her weeks were consumed by work as a paralegal at an all-female law firm and her weekends fell into a postcollegiate pattern of dinner at cheap ethnic restaurants followed by drinks at a string of bars on the Upper East Side populated by extremely recent graduates of Duke, Princeton, Stanford, Williams. Vicki was ready for something different, something edgier, more authentically
New York,
and so when a friend of a friend, a guy named Castor—who had long black hair and wore silver jewelry—invited her to a midnight poker game on the Bowery, she panted into the phone:
Yes, yes, yes!

The address Castor gave her had once been a brownstone, but the windows were blown out and boarded over, the door was pocked with bullet wounds, and the place exuded an aura of shithole. Okay, Vicki thought, he must be kidding. Or he’s trying to scare me. Or he’s trying to kill me. Because how well, really, did she
know
Castor? Or maybe she had the wrong address. Except he’d been very clear, and this was the place. Half a block down, music pumped out of CBGB, but despite that, Vicki clenched her rape whistle. She had thirty dollars in the pocket of her leather pants, a lipstick, and her keys.

Castor pushed open the door of the building from the inside. “Come on in,” he said.

The building had smelled like burning hair. The stairs were sticky with—blood? urine?—and Vicki heard the scuttling of rats.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“Upstairs,” he said. “All the way up.”

She followed Castor up the stairs, down a pitch-black hallway, up some more stairs, toward a door outlined with green light.

“The color of money,” Castor said.

They pushed into a cavernous room, decorated like a 1920s speakeasy. It was someone’s apartment—a little bald man named Doolie, who was, in fact, a squatter. He had transformed this room into the hottest poker game in the city. A three-piece jazz combo played in the corner. Juilliard students, Castor said. A bar was set up and a Rita Hayworth look-alike in a red flapper dress passed around fat corned-beef sandwiches. The center of the action was a round table that sat twelve, though half the seats were empty. It was a poker game, six men grimacing at one another.

“It’s a hundred-dollar ante,” Castor said. He handed Vicki a bill. “I’ll spot you your first game.”

“I can’t,” Vicki said. “I’ll lose your money.”

“You don’t know how to play?”

“I know how to play.” There had been some beer poker at Duke and, years before that, funny games with her parents and Brenda at the kitchen table. About as different from this kind of poker as Vicki could imagine.

“So play.” Castor nudged Vicki forward and she stumbled into one of the empty chairs. Only one of the men bothered to look up. A young guy with brown hair and dark green eyes. Preppy-looking. A kid who, much to Vicki’s dismay, looked like the hundreds of guys she met at the bars uptown. He was wearing a Dartmouth Lacrosse sweatshirt. Her first thought was,
If someone as standard-issue as you found this place, it can’t be that hot.
But the other men were older, with the definite air that they knew what they were doing.

“You in the next hand?” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

She set the hundred out on the table. “I guess.”

The other men licked their chops. They wanted her money.

She won the hand with three queens. The men pushed the pile of cash her way, chuckling. “Betty won.”

“My name is Vicki,” she said.

She played again and won with a full house. Castor brought her a martini. Vicki took an exultant sip, then thought,
This is where I get off
. Two more women joined the game and Vicki stood up.

“Oh, no,” one of the older men said. He was the hardest-looking and the loudest-laughing, the leader. “You sit your pretty bucket back down and let us win our money back.” She obeyed and won the third hand with a flush.

Then it was her turn to deal. Her hands shook as she shuffled. She thought of Crazy Eights with Brenda and shuffled with a waterfall. The men chuckled some more.
Betty.
She folded the next two hands, then won a hand. She ate half a corned-beef sandwich and had another martini. It was three o’clock in the morning and she had never felt more awake. In four hours, she would have to go to work, but she didn’t care. Dartmouth Sweatshirt was smoking a Cohiba.
Do you want one?
he asked.
Sure, why not?
She lost another hand then got up to join Castor at the bar. The band was still playing. Who were these people? Music and writing students, Castor said. Young Wall Street, young production designers, young Madison Avenue, young Seventh Avenue.

“It’s who will be running New York ten years from now.”

Vicki didn’t belong there. She would never run New York; she couldn’t even make a decision about law school. And yet she walked out of the building at five o’clock in the morning with twelve hundred dollars. Dartmouth Sweatshirt offered to walk her home; Castor was headed uptown to 120th Street, so Vicki had no choice but to agree. The streets were deserted and intimidating, and she had so much cash.

“You played well tonight,” Dartmouth Sweatshirt said.

“Beginner’s luck.”

“Coming next week?”

“Maybe. Do you go every week?”

“Every week. I like it. It’s different.”

“Yes.” Vicki looked at the guy. Out of the speakeasy, he seemed taller and more confident. He was very cute. Vicki sighed. The last thing she needed in her life was another guy. But she was grateful for the walk home. So many men were like Castor.
Sorry, going uptown
.

“What’s your name?” Vicki asked.

“Ted Stowe.”

Vicki went to the poker game the following Tuesday and the Tuesday after that. She didn’t tell anyone else about it. She had two thousand dollars in cash in her sock drawer and Wednesdays at work she spent her lunch hour napping in the ladies’ room. But Vicki craved the poker game. Castor gave it up at the end of October. He was on to other things, but not Vicki. She learned to tip Doolie from her winnings before she left, and she learned never to use the bathroom because there were always people in there—people who couldn’t have cared less about poker and the pure high of gambling—doing drugs.

All Vicki had wanted in the world was her martini, her half a sandwich, her Cohiba, her hand of cards, the John Coltrane, and the green, glowing color of money. This, she thought, is what it must feel like to be a man.

Ted was there every week, despite the fact that he was an awful card player. Some nights he didn’t win a single hand.

“You suck, Stowe,” the leader said. Vicki had learned that the hard-looking man with the Bridge and Tunnel accent was Ted’s boss on the trading floor at Smith Barney. Ken Roxby, his name was.

Ted was always good-natured, always even-tempered, even after losing five hundred dollars in half an hour, even at four o’clock in the morning, even drunk.

“I’ll get you guys back at golf,” he said.

One week, to her utter dismay, Vicki had a stomach virus and missed the poker game. Wednesday morning, her phone rang. Ted Stowe. “I won three hands last night.”

“You did not.”

“I made money,” he said. “For the first time ever.”

“And I missed it,” Vicki said.

“And I missed you,” he said.

Neither of them said anything for a second. Ted cleared his throat. “Hey, I was wondering if . . .”

“I don’t think so.”

“You haven’t even let me ask.”

“I don’t want to date anyone in the poker game,” she said. “I really, really like it and I want it to stay just the way it is.”

“Okay,” Ted said. “I quit.”

Vicki thought he meant he was quitting her, but no. He meant he was quitting the game.

“You’d quit for me?” Vicki said.

“Well, you know what they say about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer,” he said. “It feels good when you stop.”

Now, here it was, more than ten years later: Vicki was lying in bed, nursing a hangover. She wanted to blame the malaise she felt on the chemotherapy, but the symptoms were all too familiar—the floury mouth, the fuzzy, buzzing headache, the sour stomach. She begged Brenda to take the kids for an hour, and bring her a chocolate milk, and Brenda did so huffily.

“I’m not actually your slave,” Brenda said as she handed Vicki the milk.

Vicki nearly used the word “freeloader,” which would have been like setting a match to hairspray, but at that moment the front screen door clapped shut. There was a shuffle, some heavy footsteps, and then Ted’s voice. “Where are my little monsters?”

Vicki took a sip of her chocolate milk, then fell back into her covers. It was a little past nine; he must have gotten up at an ungodly hour to make the first boat. She listened to him horsing around with the kids. Ted Stowe, her husband. At another time, if she’d been separated from him for a week, she would have felt giddily excited about his arrival, nervous even. But now she felt the scary nothing.