Brenda met John Walsh at the Cupping Room on Broome Street. She arrived first and ordered a fat glass of Cabernet to calm her nerves, and lo and behold, the bartender informed her that a man at the end of the bar had offered to pay for it. What man? A portly man in a suit with a gray handlebar mustache. A man slightly younger than Brenda’s father. Brenda felt flattered, then creeped out. She was swimming in unfamiliar waters: She was alone in a bar waiting for her student to show up, and a stranger wanted to buy her drink. What was the etiquette here?

“Thank you,” Brenda said to the bartender. “That’s very nice. But I’m meeting someone.”

“Fair enough,” the bartender said. Meaning what, exactly?

No time to think because in the door strol ed Walsh, looking so handsome that everyone at the bar stared at him, not least of al the man with the handlebar mustache. Walsh was wearing a black shirt and a black leather jacket, and with his close-cropped hair, his skin, his eyes, wel , he was a lethal dose of something. Col ege 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.

She touched his ears, she ruffled his very short hair. She was melting away with desire. She wanted to hear his accent vibrate against her chest

—but enough! He had rugby and she had . . .

“Cab?” Walsh said.

“I’l get my own,” Brenda said. “East Side, you know.”

“You sure? We can stil share.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then.” Kiss, another kiss. Another, longer kiss. “I’l see you Tuesday. Brindah.”

“Tuesday?”

“In class.”

Brenda stood up from her beach towel; she felt dizzy. She walked toward the ocean. She had made no progress on the screenplay again today, and tomorrow was Friday, which meant taking Vicki to chemo, which meant Ted instead of Josh, which meant Brenda would be cal ed in as backup to watch the kids and keep the peace. She had agreed to these duties wholeheartedly. ( Repentance, she thought . Atonement. ) This weekend they had an excursion to Smith’s Point planned, complete with bonfire and boxed-up lobster dinners, in an attempt to get Vicki out of the cottage, to get her eating, to get her engaged in the summer and family life—and yet what this really meant was that no work got pursued again until Monday.

Brenda waded out past the first set of gently breaking waves and dove under. She wondered what the water felt like in Australia. Back at her towel, she scrol ed through the previous ten cal s to her cel phone, just in case Walsh had cal ed during her three-minute dip, just in case she had missed his number in the hundred other times she had checked her messages. No, nothing. Brenda had left her copy of The Innocent Impostor at home in the briefcase, where it would be safe from the sand and salt air, but if she closed her eyes, she could see the smeared note. Call John Walsh!

She would cal him; she would invite him to come to Nantucket. The beach, the swimming, the fresh air—he would love it here. Did Walsh like lobster? Probably. Being typical y Australian, he would eat anything (including, he used to tease Brenda, what he cal ed “bush tucker”—grubs, tree bark, snail eggs). But no sooner had Brenda punched the first four digits into her phone—1-212 ( I could be calling anyone in Manhattan, she thought)—than the second reel started spinning against her wil . The Crash. Brenda tried to block out the dominant image, but it came to her anyway. The Jackson Pol ock painting.

It had taken weeks for Brenda to discover the painting’s al ure, but then, in the days when she was fal ing in love with Walsh, she became entranced by it. She had a favorite blue line in the painting that ran like a vein from a massive black tangle. The blue was a strand of reason emerging from chaos. Or so she had thought.

You will never work in academia again, Suzanne Atela had said, the harshness in her voice belied by her lilting Bahamian accent. I will see to it personally. As for the vandalism charges . . .

Vandalism charges: The phrase sounded so crass, so trashy. Vandalism was a teenage girl taking a Sharpie to the bathroom wal , it was hoodlums spray-painting the skateboard park or breaking the front window of a pizzeria. It had nothing to do with Brenda and Mrs. Pencaldron exchanging words in the Barrington Room. But Brenda had been so, so angry, so confused and frustrated; she had wanted to throw something!

Even as Mrs. Pencaldron shrieked and ordered Augie Fisk to stand in the doorway, lest Brenda try to escape, even as campus security arrived, Brenda could not take her eyes off the painting. The nasty black snarl mesmerized her; it was like hair caught in a drain, like real feelings shredded by a series of bad decisions.

A hundred and sixty thousand dol ars, plus legal fees. This was only the monetary price; this did not even begin to address the damage done to Brenda’s reputation. She would never work in academia again.