The Guy Not Taken (10 page)

They’d loved each other. They’d loved us, too, I thought, smoothing the pillows, remembering all of us sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, eating potato salad and barbecued chicken off the red plastic dishes my mom used in the summertime. My sister would be tanned in her white T-shirt, and Jon would be handsome in his baseball cap, and my mother and father would hold hands and laugh at my jokes. Now our father was gone. None of us had heard from him in years. Mom didn’t appear to care about much besides her daily swim and Leon. I rolled over again, pulling the covers up to my chin. What if there was no such thing as happily ever after? What if Walt Disney and every romantic comedy I’d ever seen and all the novels I’d loved had gotten it wrong? What if . . .

“You know why I’m so angry?” Nicki asked in a hollow voice. I shrieked and almost fell off the bed. My sister didn’t notice. “Because we got cheated,” she said.

“Because Dad left?”

She didn’t answer, but I imagined I could hear her
Well, duh
hanging in the air, just beneath the fringes of the canopy.

“Well, okay, it was hard, but we all pulled through. We all went to school. We’re all doing okay.”

“Mom is dating a teenager. Jon doesn’t talk.”

“Well, Jon’s always been, you know . . . he’s a guy. They’re different. And Mom’s . . .” I let my voice trail off. I still wasn’t sure what to say about our mother. “And then there’s me,” I said. “I’m okay, right?”

Nicki said nothing.

“And you’re doing fine.”

“None of us are fine, Josie.”

In the darkness, her words had the ring of prophecy. Outside, the wind rocked the big panes of the windows, and I could hear rain pattering down on the empty streets.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

No reply.

“What do you mean that none of us are fine?” She rolled over, sighing. I held my breath and then reached for her, gathering her scrawny shoulders in my arms . . . and, for a brief moment, she let her head fall back against my chest and let me hold her.

“Go to sleep,” she said gruffly, wriggling away.

“Big day tomorrow,” I replied, rolling back to my side of the bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the rain, imagining I could also hear the clicks of the digital clock ticking off the minutes until my wedding day.

I remember everything before the vows in snatches: the flower girl sobbing after a hot roller burned her cheek; my mother and Leon holding hands on a bench while the caterers bustled around them; David smiling at me as I made my way down the aisle with my mother on my left side and nobody on my right. In that moment, with two hundred and twenty guests looking at me from their ribbon-bedecked chairs, with tears on my mother’s cheek and our announcement in that morning’s
Times,
I wasn’t thinking about love or happiness or how this was the ending the fairy tales had promised, the reward for the
princess who survived the enchantment or the wicked stepmother or the hundred years’ sleep. I was thinking,
I guess if this doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.

•   •   •

Our first dance—per David’s request, to Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”—went off without a hitch. David’s father’s toast was heartfelt, if a little generic. The salad plates appeared and then were replaced with the main course. David and I visited the tables, smiling, accepting congratulations and good wishes, thanking our parents, cutting the cake. Then it was midnight. The last guests collected their coats and umbrellas, the caterers cleared the tables, the band packed its instruments away. I sank down on a beige velvet couch in the lobby, kicked off my shoes, and stared across the street at the empty benches and fountains of the park. It had rained on and off all day long and now it was pouring, a cold, driving rain that had cleared the sidewalks, except for a dogged trio of joggers in reflective raingear and a few homeless guys bundled up in trash bags. Wind lashed the trees and made the clipped hedges quiver.

“You ready?” asked David, smiling down at me, handsome in his tuxedo. He’d shaved so carefully that his cheeks were still pink with razor burn, and his bow tie was slightly askew.

“Sure,” I said and got to my feet. We were heading toward the elevators when I caught sight of something through the double glass doors that made my heart stop. My feet, too. David, following behind me, bumped into my back.

“Josie, what . . .”

“Wait,” I said, and spun around and dashed through the lobby doors into the cold, freezing darkness, running across Nineteenth Street barefoot in my wedding gown. Rain beat down, ruining my elaborately pinned and sprayed updo, sending
my makeup sliding down my face, basting the satin bodice of the dress against me. In the center of the park, the man I’d seen was standing in front of the leaf-clotted fountain, with the headlights from the passing cars glinting off his glasses and his hands in the pockets of his overcoat.

“Dad?” I called, and wiped rain off my face.

It wasn’t him, of course. Up close, the homeless man in the torn coat didn’t even really look like my father. The dreadlocks should have been a clue.

The man’s face broke into a smile as he looked at me, soaked and barefoot, shivering.

“Oh, now, look at you!”

“Yeah,” I said, and I started to cry. “Yeah. Look at me.”

He cocked his head and told me I was a beautiful bride, which only made me cry harder.

“You got any money, honey?”

I didn’t. But I had a slice of wedding cake in my hands, a piece of cake in a wax paper bag upon which my name and David’s were embossed in gold. We’d given cake to our guests on their way out the door. Single girls, I’d read, could put the cake under their pillows and dream of the man they’d marry.

I handed the homeless guy my slice. He thanked me and told me good luck. Then I lifted up my sodden skirt and, with as much dignity as I could muster, walked back across the street.

“What was that about?” my husband of four hours asked, with more than a little concern in his voice.

“I thought I dropped something,” I said. “When we were taking the pictures.” I stepped close to him, tilting my head up for a kiss, and as David’s warm lips brushed my cold ones, I thought that every story I would tell for the rest of my life would somehow be about this: about the man who left and
never came back. Except, possibly, the stories about guys calling themselves Little Ray . . . and, for all I knew, maybe those, too.

“I love you, Josie,” my husband whispered. He lifted a lock of wet hair off my cheek and brushed at my skin with his sleeve, and I managed to smile.

“I’m all right now,” I said.

S
WIM

T
he girl’s name was Caitlyn. That fall, it seemed like they were all Caitlyn, or some oddly spelled variation of the name. Judging from the way she kept crossing and recrossing her long, denim-clad legs and flipping her silver cell phone open to check the time, she wanted to be anywhere but in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Beverly and Robertson, sharing a table for two with my laptop and me.

“So in terms of a major? I’m thinking international relations? I want to be a diplomat?”

I nodded and typed it in. Every sentence out of her sparkly pink seventeen-year-old lips came out sounding like a question. I could just imagine her sitting across the table from some third-world potentate and toying with the silver ring through the cartilage of her left ear.
We’d like you to give up your weapons? Because biological warfare? Is bad?

Patience, Ruth,
I told myself. “Extracurriculars?” I asked, fingers hovering over the keyboard as the woman at the table next to mine, with bristly eyebrows and a bitter twist to her mouth, gave me a nasty look. I ignored her. Each Saturday I got to the coffee shop at seven o’clock, early enough to claim a prime corner table next to the big window, across the room from the
blenders and the bathrooms, right near the store’s single power outlet. The people who’d show up later—screenwriters or screenwriter-wannabes, most of them—were forced to play musical tables, inching closer and closer to my corner, stomping across the wide-planked hardwood floors or lingering ostentatiously beside the cream and sugar, their glares growing fiercer as their batteries slowly died. For six hours every Saturday, I would meet with my teenage clients, the ones who went to pricey private schools and whose parents had given them one more leg up on life by hiring an application consultant to help them get into college.

Caitlyn let go of her earring and tugged at a lock of glossy brown hair. She smelled intensely of coconuts—her shampoo, I figured—and the cloying, fruity scent emanating from the wad of Pepto-pink gum I glimpsed whenever she opened her mouth. I made a note to tell her not to chew gum at her interviews.

“Um, tennis?”

“You’re on the tennis team?” I asked.
Please,
I thought. Something. Anything. So far her extracurricular page was completely blank.

“Um, no? I just like to play? Or I used to?”

I typed
tennis.
“How about clubs? Musical instruments?” I stared at her hopefully. She gave me a blank look back. “Piano lessons?”

Caitlyn made a face, pink lips wincing above her sweetly rounded chin. “When I was, like, six?”

“Volunteer work?”
Yeah, right,
I told myself. Caitlyn stopped smacking her gum, flipped her phone shut, and straightened in her chair.

“I have this friend? She’s having surgery?” She lowered her voice. “A breast reduction? And I’m going to be taking care of her dog while she, you know, recuperates.”

Jesus wept. I typed it in anyhow.

“Well, not, you know, technically. They’ve got a dog walker? But I’ll be coming over to, you know, play with him?” She tugged the piece of hair down to her lips and started chewing it. “Or her?”

I made a note to remind her not to chew her hair during the interview, right beneath my note about gum. Then I saved her file, closed my laptop, took a gulp of the drink I’d ordered before this ordeal began, and gave her what I hoped was a friendly smile. She was all gangly limbs in tight jeans and a tiny pink T-shirt, with parents who’d happily agreed to my five-thousand-dollar fee. This guaranteed young Caitlyn three months’ worth of my services, an hour-long videotaped interview coaching session, and a full review of up to five essays. We’d be in this for the long haul. I might as well try to find something to like about her.

“Well!” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “This is plenty for me to start with!”

She fiddled with her paper coffee cup, wiping sparkly pink lipstick off the rim with her pinkie. “Where’d you go to college?” she asked.

“In Connecticut. A small liberal arts college called Grant. You’ve probably never heard of it.” Caitlyn’s parents had told me that she wasn’t considering any schools outside of California, and she had her heart set on Berkeley. It was a long shot, given her B average and solidly middle-of-the-pack test scores. Then again, Mom and Dad were both alums and, judging from the sleek gold Lexus their daughter drove, they could have been making major gifts to the endowment fund since Caitlyn was but a twinkle in their eyes.

“Did you like it?” She tilted her head, looking me straight in the eye, then letting her gaze drift sideways as she rested her
cheek on her palm. My own hand inadvertently rose to my own face. With the Dermablend, my grandmother swore, you couldn’t see the scar. With her vision, I told her, it was a wonder she could see anything.

“Yeah, I did. I liked it a lot.”
Lie.
My first week of college I’d gone to a party in a fraternity house basement. It was hot and crowded and noisy, and I’d gotten separated from my roommate as we made our way through the forest of bodies toward the keg. I’d gone upstairs to hide in the frat house’s library, which I’d figured, correctly, would be deserted. I was curled up in an armchair in a dark corner, planning on going back downstairs when the crowd had thinned out, when a girl and a guy had stumbled into the darkened room and flopped onto the couch.

“Jesus,” said the guy. “Did you see that girl with, like, a crater on her face?”

My hands flew to my cheek. It did look like a crater. A shiny pink crater, the size of the bottom of a soda can, slightly indented, like someone had scooped out the flesh. The scar tugged the corner of my right eye down and extended across my cheek to the corner of my mouth. I’d fooled myself into thinking that I looked all right that night. I’d worn a cute halter top, pink sandals, jeans my roommate had lent me, and perfume and lipstick and eyeliner on my good left eye and my droopy right one.

“I wonder what happened?” the girl mused.

What do you think happened, dumb-ass? I got hurt!
I wanted to say. I waited until they were too engrossed in each other to notice me. Then I crept out of the room, out of the frat house, down the sidewalk and over the hill and into the fitness center, which was open twenty-four hours a day and was one of the reasons I’d gone to Grant in the first place.

The pool was empty and glowing turquoise in the murky light. The familiar smell of chlorine, the feel of the water holding me up, eased my homesickness and my shame. I’d shucked
off my borrowed finery, washed the makeup from my face in the shower, scrubbing extra hard against the disk of pink that no cosmetic could ever erase and no surgery could restore, and swum laps for two hours. Later, after I’d gotten dressed again, I stared at myself in the mirror. My wet hair clung to my scalp, and the scar was livid against my water-bleached skin.
Smile!
my grandmother always told me, her own face lighting up in demonstration.
If you’d smile, they’d see the smile, not the scar!
In the mirror, I attempted a friendly smile. A flirtatious smile. A charming little nice-to-meet-you smile. I saw the same pale, lightly freckled skin that my mother had, in pictures, the same clear blue eyes; a straight nose, full lips, eyebrows that refused to arch no matter how I tried to coax them. Good teeth, thanks to the braces; no zits, thanks to the Accutane. A cute face, or it could have been, without, like, the crater. I sighed, and turned away from the mirror and trudged back up the hill to my dorm.