Barefoot Beach Read Online Free Page A

invitation. “So come on in already, sweetheart.”
    I imagined Henry London Farrell riding the fragrant sea breeze from the balcony to the bed, where I lay against two pillows, drifting, drifting.
    A strong draft of night air suddenly whipped through the window, perfuming the room with beach plum and wild lilac and turning the white sheers to dancing ghosts.
    But they were the only ghosts. Lon was a no-show.

    Our son was conceived in that airy master bedroom. Or at least the idea for him was hatched there during a night of moonlit marital passion. As Lon rolled me to my knees, the preferred position for success according to a handout from my gynecologist, he whispered from behind me, “I want us to have a baby.”
    â€œI know, my love,” I said. But I’d known that far too long. Through a year and a half of tests, promising surgeries, and disappointing outcomes. Through the mea culpas or, as Lon put it, “It’s not youa—it’s mea culpa.”
    It
was
him.
    His confidence was already at a low ebb, sapped by the experience with
Banshee River
. Initial sales had been strong, but as the reviews came in (“Disappointing second act.”—
The New
Yorker
), they dropped precipitously. He was struggling with his third novel,
Wild Mountain
, when the doctors’ grim report came in.
    â€œAbnormal sperm motility and morphology” was the medical term for a lethal combination that defied the best efforts of science to correct. Lousy swimmers, was Lon’s diagnosis.
    â€œI’m fucking sterile in every way. Well, the hell with the little buggers. We’ll find a way.”
    On that night, on that bed, as he lifted my hair to nuzzle my neck, he’d murmured, “You’re going to have our baby, I promise you. You’re going to get pregnant and have morning sickness and throw up on my Harris Tweed jacket. You’re going to get waddlingly fat and weighed down with a pairof double D knockers, and you’ll need to pee all the time and knit booties or whatever it is they knit these days. And at the end, you’ll pop out a redheaded girl or a blue-eyed boy, smart and funny and a royal pain in the ass, just like Mom.”
    â€œAh, you say the most romantic things. Tell me more,” I shot back, and heard his gruff laugh go lusty as he growled from behind, “Show, not tell. The writer’s credo,” and we made the kind of frenzied love that under normal circumstances would have,
should
have produced something more than sweaty sheets.
    Afterward, with me nestled in the crook of his arm, as our breathing slowed, we stared at the filmy curtains billowing in the light breeze, thinking the same thing, I was sure. Wonderful sex but fruitless, in the truest biological sense of the word.
    After a few minutes, I felt him gently shift me aside. Before Lon had given up cigarettes because smoking inhibited sperm production, this would have been the moment he’d flick on the bedside light and rummage in the night table drawer for his pack of Marlboros. Now he extracted a clipped sheaf of papers. “Take a look at these,” he said. “You floated using a sperm bank as an option a while back and I wasn’t all that receptive. But you know me; ideas have to churn. I’ve been thinking about it and I decided to follow up. Did a little research. Made a few calls. Stopped by to pick up some printouts.” He glanced at me, his eyes registering concern that he might have overstepped some female-drawn invisible boundary. “Just a possibility. No pressure.”
    As he handed over the papers, he said, “The quality of the donors is surprisingly impressive. Three look particularly good. But check out number 1659. I really like the sound of him.”
    I read aloud, “‘Six feet two inches. One hundred seventy-five pounds.’ Your build. ‘Ethnic background: Dutch.’”
    â€œClose enough,” Lon said.