The Guy Not Taken (19 page)

“Don’t worry. I know you said we were just going to test the waters, but now we’ve got a fish on the line. A big fish. I’m going to get you . . .” He bent, smiling, so close she could feel the heat of his skin, the prickle of his cheek against her ear, and whispered a number so extraordinary it made her gasp out loud. She gulped down the rest of her drink while he beamed at her, eyebrows raised, face expectant. “So? What do you think about that?”

She smiled woozily, then leaned against him, resting her head on his firm shoulder, closing her eyes, breathing when he breathed. He smelled like wet wool and Irish Spring soap as he eased one arm around her shoulders, giving her a squeeze before detaching himself to pull out his wallet and pay for the drinks. “But where will I go?” Jess’s voice was tiny, lost in the clink of
ice against glasses and the roar of the soccer fans. Billy, busy with the bartender, either didn’t hear or couldn’t answer.

•   •   •

“You don’t understand,” she told Namita as they waited in line for the movies the following Friday. “This woman. Horrible Toby. She’s like a stubbed toe.”

“Let me hear it,” Namita said.

Jess groaned. “She keeps showing up. Three times, so far! The last time she didn’t even call! She just leaned on the buzzer until I opened the door.”

“What does she want?”

“Measurements for window treatments,” Jess said, wincing as she remembered the sound of Toby’s tape measure snapping up and down the walls while Jess had huddled in the kitchen, counting the minutes on her microwave clock until Toby departed. “And once she brought her feng shui consultant.”

“But of course,” Namita said. “Listen. Radical thought. You could just tell her to forget it. Tell her the place isn’t for sale anymore. Take it off the market.”

Jess hung her head. Telling Horrible Toby that the deal was off would mean telling Charming Billy the same thing, and she just couldn’t make herself pull the trigger, even though she’d tried. She’d gone to the Hallahan offices that very afternoon to make her plea in person. Billy had walked her to Citarella, bought her a yogurt parfait, held her hands across the small round table, and asked whether the problem was selling to Toby or selling at all.

“Selling at all,” she’d said eagerly, finally glimpsing a way out of the mess. “I mean, I’d been getting antsy, but now that I’ve been thinking . . .” She stared at her lap. “I’m just not sure I’m ready.”

“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “You’re ready. You can do this.
And we’ll find a place. A perfect place.” He smiled at her and she felt herself floating away, born up into the ether on
we
and
perfect.

Billy leaned across the table, gray eyes kind. “Tell me what you want.”

She looked at him and blushed. His smile widened. “Okay, besides that,” he said. “What do you want in an apartment?”

“A view,” she said. “Of a river, or trees.”

He nodded.

“And a neighborhood,” said Jess. “Where I’d know people. With a pizza place and a bookstore and a coffee shop and a park. Maybe Brooklyn?” Billy lived in Red Hook.

He nodded. “I can show you some places you’ll love,” he said. “Someplace that’s perfect for you. For Jess Norton, not Jess Norton’s great-aunt.”

She nodded.
Just right for her.
She pictured an apartment, cozier than Aunt Cat’s, a one-bedroom that the two of them could afford on their own; a brownstone on a side street with high ceilings and big windows overlooking a tree-lined block, with a galley kitchen where she and Billy would cook dinner together, hip to hip. They’d walk along the snowy sidewalk in the wintertime to buy Billy a Christmas tree, and have brunch every Sunday at one of the neighborhood cafes, and fall asleep each night together, snug beneath the blankets under a skylight admitting a wedge of the starry night sky.

Eight years had passed since she’d inherited her aunt’s apartment—eight years gone, as if she’d fallen asleep at twenty-two and woken up almost thirty. In all that time, she’d believed Aunt Cat’s place to be her paradise, her promised land, her reward for surviving her father and New York City. But now, with Billy beaming at her, she could see it differently. Maybe the apartment was really just the round room at the top of the palace tower where the princess pricked her finger and slept for a hundred
years. Now she had Billy, Charming Billy, and he would kiss her and lead her home. To Brooklyn, and a little place to call their own, a safe little nest with maybe, someday, a cradle in the corner of the bedroom, a rocking chair set in a slant of sun.

“Things are going to happen. I can feel it,” Billy said, finishing his scone in three giant bites. “Stay by the phone tonight,” he said, leaning close to brush Jess’s cheek with his lips. She brushed crumbs off his collar, inhaling his fragrance—wet wool and soap again, with the addition of sweet bay rum cologne. Her father had worn that, too, a long time ago. “I’ll be in touch.”

True to his word, when she got home from the movies Billy was sitting on the hallway floor, where she’d first seen him, but looking considerably less glum. He leapt to his feet when he saw her, and scooped her into his arms. “Rich girl, rich girl,” he chanted.

“Put me down!” Jess squealed as he hoisted her in the air. Her skin tingled; her heart pounded so loud she was sure he’d be able to hear. He set her gently on her feet and, after she unlocked the door, he ushered her to the couch, dropped to his knees, took her hands, and whispered Toby’s price in her ear. She gasped and saw her beloved apartment blur around the edges.

“There’s a hitch, though.”

“What hitch?” she squeaked. His hands were still on hers, and she felt her body leaning toward his.

“She wants to close next month. I know it’s last-minute, which is probably why she was willing to go so far above asking, but her stepson, or godson, or whatever, moved in with them, and she wants him out. I’ll help you find movers, and storage, and temporary housing. Whatever you need, Jess. But you should know, you’re not going to get a better deal than this.”

Somehow, she managed to pull herself away from him and
sit up straight. She looked around the room: the photographs of Moscow and Trieste and Milan, the cloisonné lamps with fringed peach-colored shades, the stacks of art books and novels, the heavy glass bowls full of nuts and candy that Aunt Cat always refilled for Jess’s visits. She’d lived here for eight years and she hadn’t ever gotten so much as a new set of sheets, let alone her own photographs, her own artwork or furniture.
Time to move on,
she thought.
Time to move out.
“So you think we should take it?”

His eyes were intent and his voice was as serious as that of a man taking wedding vows when he answered, “I think we should.”

•   •   •

Jess wrangled three personal days from her unhappy boss at
eBiz,
and spent them packing up and supervising the movers, a trio of fire-hydrant-shaped fellows who spoke a language composed largely of grunts and seemed to take as their personal mission the task of folding, breaking, soiling, and mutilating every single thing she had inherited. Finally, early Friday morning, the last of Aunt Cat’s mahogany sideboards and marble end tables had been wrapped in padded blankets and wrestled onto the mirrored elevator, and the final cardboard box of books was loaded onto a grimy white truck (someone had written “Wash me, please!” in the dirt across the driver’s side door) and driven off to a storage facility in Newark. Jess took a quick shower, pulled on her best blue suit, wadded her wet towel and dirty clothes into a duffel bag, and stood in the middle of the empty living room, where the walls bore ghostly imprints of Aunt Cat’s paintings, and the floors had grooves where the couch and chairs used to be.

She wandered over to the window. The summer before college she’d spent so many nights sitting there. She’d look down
at the rustling trees of Riverside Park, at the Hudson River running beyond them, at the late-night joggers and the strolling couples, and think about the kind of life she’d make for herself. She hoped it would be something like Aunt Cat’s life, with stacks of books in every room, and dinner parties each month, with red wine and down comforters, surrounded by the things, and the people, she loved. But the truth was, red wine gave her headaches and she’d never been much for parties . . . and none of it mattered because now she and Billy would make a life together.

The doorbell rang and Toby stormed into the kitchen, late, and, somehow, acting as if that was Jess’s fault. Billy followed her, squeezing Jess’s hand, as Toby attacked the apartment as if it were a man who’d wronged her, vigorously flushing toilets, wrenching taps open and shut, staring for long, ominous minutes at the light patch on the bedroom wall where Aunt Catherine’s carved wooden dresser had formerly resided.

“You should have repainted,” she said, and narrowed her eyes.

“I . . .” Jess stammered.

“We’ll settle that at the table,” Billy said smoothly. Underneath his down coat he wore an elegant striped suit and a patterned silk tie of heavy burnt-orange silk. The blue wool cap that Jess had grown accustomed to was gone, replaced with a camel-colored muffler that looked suspiciously like cashmere.

She reached for his hand as Toby yanked open the oven door, then kicked it shut with one Birkenstock-shod foot. Billy’s cell phone rang, and as he turned his back he held up one finger and said, “William Gurwich,” into the receiver. “At the table, okay?” he said into the telephone. He eased Jess into her coat, then out the door. Outside, there was a town car idling at the curb.

“Wait,” she said. Billy sighed, and stopped with one hand on her back and one hand on the roof of the car. Jess stared at him, panicked, thinking,
This is all wrong.
Billy kissed her, then looked over her shoulder, up toward the Emerson, its facade glowing under the thin winter sun. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said.

•   •   •

Forty-five minutes later, Jess found herself in a boardroom with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park, sitting at a sleek teak conference table, signing her name again and again and again, handing over her driver’s license and a copy of Aunt Cat’s will, swearing and affirming that she, Jessica Hope Norton, a single woman, was the sole owner without any legal encumbrance of the property. Toby was there with her broker. Her stepson/godson/whatever was nowhere in sight. In addition to Billy, there were two lawyers, a notary, and a receptionist who’d asked if she could bring anything. “Coffee for everyone?” Billy asked, raising his eyebrows as he looked around the table. When she’d returned with the drinks, and a tray of pastries, he hadn’t even thanked her before selecting the biggest muffin from the pile.

This can’t be happening,
Jess thought as she stared down and saw her hand moving, seemingly of its own volition, signing her name. She tried to catch Billy’s eye, but he was talking to one of the lawyers. She wrote her name and pictured Toby’s lip curling as she stood in Jess’s bedroom, eyeballing the pictures by the side of her bed during one of her unannounced visits. “My mom was Miss Penn State,” Jess explained as the other woman scrutinized a shot of Gloria waving from the backseat of a convertible.

Toby tilted the picture from side to side as if it were a glass of wine she was inspecting for sediment. “She’s not that goodlooking,”
Toby finally said. “Actually,” she’d continued, making her way into the second bathroom, “I thought it was a picture of you.”

Billy slid another stack of documents across the table, gave Jess a quick wink, and snickered at something on his BlackBerry. Jess wrote the date, her social security number. She accepted the check that he handed her in a heavy cream-colored envelope. All those zeroes, she thought, and tried to feel elated, and couldn’t.

“Good luck,” Jess said faintly. Toby got to her feet, pocketed the keys, gave a grimace that could have been interpreted as a smile, flung her fringed wrap around her, and stomped out of the room. Jess sank back in her chair and spun so she could look out at the dirty gray sky, the snowbanks spangled with condensed exhaust fumes and broken glass, the bare, bedraggled trees.

Billy smiled at her, a big, eat-the-world grin, not the sardonic half-smile she’d gotten used to, along with the down coat and the wool cap and the chapped fingers that could never find Mrs. Bastian’s key on the first try. “Thank you,” he said.
It wasn’t “I love you,”
Jess thought. But it wasn’t nothing. And maybe it was enough.

Billy stood behind her chair and rocked it back and forth. “Take a look,” he crooned. “It’s all yours.” He sat down beside her, crossed his legs and adjusted the crease in his pants. “Just tell me where you want to start. Uptown? Downtown?”

“We can talk about it tonight,” Jess said. She turned away from the window and looked into his face. “Our place?”

“Sure,” he said, and hugged her, holding her close as she buried her face in the warm hollow of his neck. “Eight okay?”

“Perfect,” she said.

•   •   •

That night she leaned against the brick wall of their restaurant, feeling the cold dampness seeping through her skirt. The wind blew sheets of newspaper and empty soda cans along the dirty sidewalk; a bus splattered sleet against the curb. At 8:15, Billy breezed down the block, wearing his new clothes and his old, familiar, heartbreaking smile. “So!” he said heartily, pulling off his gloves. “Have you been thinking about where we should start?”

“Wherever,” she said eagerly. Too eagerly. Something flickered in his eyes, but it was too late for her to take it back, too late to stop. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

He squeezed her hands briefly. Then he pulled away. “Jess,” he began, taking a deep breath. “The thing is . . .”

Another bus rumbled by. Jess knew what the thing was, and she couldn’t stand to hear him say it—not so close on the heels of the worst mistake she’d ever made in her life. She pulled away, trying for dignity, a measure of Aunt Cat’s cool reserve, as Billy babbled about how much she meant to him, how she was a great girl but he simply wasn’t in a place where he could consider anything long term, and besides, there was his writing to think about.