The Guy Not Taken Page 11

  “This is my brother, Charlie. Charlie, this is Ruth? She’s helping me with my essays?”

  “Hi.” I bent down so I was at eye level with Charlie. I looked up at Caitlyn, who nodded, then extended my hand and touched it to his. His fingers were folded tightly against his palms, and his skin was so pale I could see the veins underneath it. “Nice to meet you.”

  He gave another hoot, his lips working, eyes focused on my face. Caitlyn reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and wiped his lips. “Do you want lunch now?” she asked. I wondered whether Charlie was the reason she always talked in questions, the way she left her sentences open-ended, blanks that would never get filled in. “We’re going to go to the food court?”

  “Oh. Well, have fun.”

  Charlie moaned again, more loudly, struggling hard to make himself understood. Caitlyn bent her shining head to his, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. Her brother’s eyes stayed locked on mine, and I thought I could see where he was pointing, where he was going.

  When Caitlyn lifted her head her fair skin was flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  Charlie’s fist bounced on his chest.

  “He has cerebral palsy,” she said.

  I nodded, looked at Charlie, and touched my cheek. “It’s a scar from an accident. A long time ago.”

  Caitlyn sighed, then straightened up. “Do you want to get some lunch with us?” The three of us walked to the food court and sat at a metal-legged plastic-topped table, surrounded by chattering teenagers, mothers and daughters, women in suits and hose and sneakers lingering on their lunch breaks. Caitlyn bought herself a Diet Coke, and, for Charlie, a paper cone of french fries. She dipped each one into ketchup and lifted it to his lips with the same absentminded love as the mothers feeding their toddlers at the neighboring tables.

  “When I was three my parents were driving on the Mass Pike to Boston for Thanksgiving. They were both teachers, they’d gone to school in Boston, and they were going to have Thanksgiving with some friends. Their car hit a patch of ice and rolled over into a ditch. They died, and I went through the windshield, in my car seat. That’s what happened to my face.”

  Charlie twisted his head toward his sister, his mouth working. “Do you remember it?” Caitlyn translated.

  I shook my head. “I really don’t remember it much.”

  Caitlyn wiped Charlie’s face with a napkin. “So who took care of you?”

  “My grandmother. She was living down in Coral Gables, but she didn’t think that was a good place to raise a little girl, so she moved up to my parents’ house in Framingham, and we lived there.”

  They seemed to think this over while Charlie chewed another french fry. He had the same brown eyes and rounded chin as his sister. There was a smear of pink glitter on his cheek, where, I thought, she’d kissed him.

  I got up.

  “Well, Caitlyn, I’ll see you on Saturday. Nice to meet you, Charlie. Have a good day.” It sounded so stupid, so trite. I wondered what Charlie’s life was like, trapped in a body he couldn’t control, able to understand what he was seeing and hearing, unable to communicate. I was halfway out of the food court when I turned around and went back to their table and tapped Caitlyn on the shoulder. “You should write about this,” I blurted. She looked up at me with her shiny brown eyes. Her tiny pink purse was hooked over one of the arms of Charlie’s wheelchair, which had NASCAR stickers on the sides. “I was wrong about you,” I said.

  She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s okay,” she said.

  • • •

  I skipped my swim that night. After it got dark, I pulled on a sweater that had been my mother’s. It was frayed at the elbows and unraveling at the hem. In a few of the pictures I had, she was wearing this sweater, and I imagined that even after all this time it still held some trace of her—a strand of her walnut-colored hair, the lavender smell of her skin, invisible handprints where my father had touched her, pulling her close. I curled up in a corner of the couch and told my grandmother about Caitlyn and Charlie. Halfway through the story I started to cry. Grandma pulled a wad of tissue paper from her sleeve and handed it to me.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” She was dressed in a white nightgown with mounds of lace at the neck and the wrists, and she looked like a baby bird peeking out of its nest.

  “I don’t know.” I wiped my eyes. “People surprise me sometimes.”

  She considered this. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “As long as people can still surprise you, it means you’re not dead.”

  At midnight I was still awake, nerves jangling, muscles twitching, missing the water. I flipped open my laptop, clicked on “Documents,” double-clicked on the file called “The Little Family.” It was a screenplay I’d started years ago. I read through the first ten pages slowly. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared, either. It had potential. I hit “save” and then scrolled through my in-box, opening a missive from Lonelyguy that had arrived the day before. “Maybe we should have dinner.”

  I hit “reply,” then scrolled up to find an e-mail from Caitlyn that had come that afternoon. “New Essay,” the subject line read.

  “My eleven-year-old brother Charlie will never visit Paris,” she’d written. “He won’t play Little League baseball or run on the beach. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was three months old. Cerebral: of or pertaining to the brain. Palsy: a disorder of movement or posture. My brother sees the world from his wheelchair. When I grow up, I will see things for him. I will go to all the places he can’t go, places where they don’t have curb cuts or wheelchair ramps, to flea markets and mountaintops, all the places in the world.”

  I buried my face in my hands. How did Caitlyn get so brave? Why was I so afraid? I opened my eyes and closed the window containing Caitlyn’s essay, leaving up my unwritten reply to Lonelyguy’s letter and remembering what I’d told her the first time we’d met. We’re still early in the process. It’s not too late to change your mind.

  GOOD MEN

  At just past three o’clock in the morning, Bruce Guberman and the rest of the liquored-up bachelors piled into a booth at World of Bagels and hatched the plan to kidnap Bruce’s girlfriend’s rat terrier, Nifkin.

  There had been twelve of them when the bachelor party had started, in the rented back room of a bar in Brooklyn. First they shot pool, then they’d played poker with laundry quarters and subway tokens. Poker had seemed like a good idea when Tom, the best man, broke out the cards, only he’d insisted that the winner of each hand do a shot, which meant that by the fifth hand there was a lot of inadvertent bluffing going on.

  Things deteriorated after midnight when four of the groom’s fellow lab mates split a cab back to Manhattan and the room began to empty out. Clouds of smoke and the sour reek of beer hung over the bar’s scarred wooden tables and overflowing ashtrays. Tom presented Neil, the groom, with his wedding gift, which turned out to be a three-quarter ounce of marijuana wrapped, as Neil described it, in a festive matrimonial Baggie. Tom, with his face flushed and long strands of brown hair sticking to his sweaty cheeks, liked the sound of that so much he repeated it over and over as the first bowl was packed and the pipe went around: Festive Matrimonial Baggie!

  Half an hour later the stripper arrived—dressed, for some reason, like Snow White, in a tight red top and a full blue skirt, with her lips painted into a crimson Cupid’s bow. Bruce blinked, trying to make sense of the costume. Did she have a day job at Six Flags or something like that? Her black hair was glossy under the bar’s smoke-ringed lights. It might have been a wig. Bruce was never sure of those things. Cannie, his girlfriend, would twirl around for him, grinning, asking, “What do you think?” He’d stare at her desperately. What had changed? Had she lost weight, or gotten her hair highlighted? Was she wearing a new coat or new shoes? Sometimes she’d take pity on him and tell him—“He cut three inches! That’s this much!” she’d say, holding her fing
ers apart for emphasis. He’d nod and smile and tell her it looked great, when the truth was that the only time he could really tell for sure was when she’d had her hair permed, and then only because of the smell.

  The stripper set up a boom box that blared rap tunes with X-rated lyrics—put your back into it, put your ass into it. Within minutes she’d wriggled free of her costume and was gyrating against all five feet, four inches of the groom as if she were riding a mechanical merry-go-round—up, down, up, down, staring at him with a fixed, rigid smile, as Tom dumped a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor over the soon-to-be-bridegroom’s head.

  “I’m the eighth dwarf!” Tom hollered, waving his hands in the air. “Horny!”

  “There is no dwarf named Horny,” said Chris, sitting at the bar in perfectly pressed chinos and a crisp white shirt, looking as if he hadn’t drunk more than the rest of them put together. “There’s, let’s see . . . Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy . . . Doc . . . Sleepy . . .”

  “Dopey!” Tom yelled, flicking his hair out of his eyes and rolling his meaty shoulders as if readying for a fight. “There’s a dwarf named Dopey! How sweet is that?”

  The stripper bent down, clamped Neil’s chin between her fingers, and gave him a long kiss, mashing her lips against his and turning her head this way and that, as if she were trying to shake water out of her ears. The pipe went around again, and Bruce inhaled deeply. “Bashful,” Chris said. Bruce handed him the pipe. Chris sucked in the smoke, held his breath, turned pink, and exhaled, coughing. Chris worked less and got high more often than anyone Bruce had ever met, but because he was blessed with the square jaw and fine features of a comicbook hero, and the dark-brown hair and bright-blue eyes of Superman himself, Chris got away with murder. “Happy . . . Doc . . .” Chris continued. The stripper disappeared into the bathroom, then returned in street clothes and demanded payment in a thick Long Island accent. Bruce, who’d somehow wound up the most sober of the bunch, hustled up twenty bucks apiece from the six remaining members of the bachelor party and handed it over. The stripper tucked the bills into her purse. “Good luck to your friend there,” she said, smiling at him, then turning to wink at Chris.

  She had her keys in her hand, and Bruce noticed that her key chain held a scuffed plastic square with a baby’s picture inside. The little girl wore a frilly white dress and a sequined headband wrapped around her mostly hairless head. The stripper caught him staring and smiled with more animation than she’d shown to Neil during three songs and a simulated blow job.

  “That’s Madison,” she said. “Isn’t she a cutie?”

  Bruce had smiled and nodded his assent, not particularly wanting to contemplate a world where women dressed up as Snow White, shucked off their clothes, and then headed home to little girls named Madison.

  “You got any kids?” she asked.

  Bruce shook his head. She reached up and patted his cheek.

  “You’ll have ’em someday,” she predicted. “You’ll meet someone nice.”

  He wanted to tell her that he already had met someone nice. He wanted to tell someone about him and Cannie, and the talk they’d had that Saturday night, which had begun with her bringing him a glass of wine and sitting beside him on the couch, close to him but not touching, and asking, “Do you ever think about where we’re going with this?”

  But the stripper was already shouldering her bag and turning to go. Neil was in the corner with Tom and Chris, smoking a cigar and swaying slowly back and forth, like a man trying to dance underwater. He had a beatific smile on his face, a garter belt hanging from around his neck, and malt liquor soaking his hair. “I love you guys!” he yelled. With his glasses askew, slanted sideways on his narrow face, Bruce thought he looked exactly the way he had when they’d met, in sixth-grade science class, pale and frail and destined to get the crap beaten out of him on any playground in the world. Time to go, Bruce thought, and went outside to call a cab.

  Then there was another bar, and another one after that, and lots of tequila on the way. On one of the rides, Tom crammed his six-foot-tall, former-football-player physique into the front seat and tried to convince the cabdriver that Walt Disney was a stoner—“because how else do you explain a dwarf named Dopey?”

  “You know who was definitely a stoner? Old King Cole!” Chris called from the backseat. “He called for his pipe . . . and he called for his bowl. . . .”

  “What about the fiddlers three?” asked Neil, and Chris had shrugged, and said they were friends, he guessed.

  At the final bar they’d encountered a table full of women who all had penis-shaped swizzle sticks in their drinks.

  “We’re at a bachelorette party,” one of them explained, waving a dildo at them as the woman in the center with a veil perched jauntily on her head squealed over the edible underpants she’d just unwrapped. They bought the bachelorettes a round of drinks, and Tom asked if they’d had a stripper. When they said no, he stood on their table and actually worked his pants down over his hips, revealing a vast expanse of hairy white belly as he proclaimed himself, once more, to be the eighth dwarf, Horny. That was when the bouncer grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him off the table, and hustled all of them out the door.

  And then there were five of them, crammed into a booth in the all-night diner at three a.m.: Neil, who was getting married in two days, sitting between Tom, who’d been Neil’s college roommate and who now sold Hondas for a living, and Chris, who, along with Bruce, had known Neil since elementary school. At the far end of the booth was some guy from Neil’s lab, a fellow postdoc named Steve, who was either passed out or sleeping at the table with his head pillowed on his forearms.

  Bruce nudged him. “Hey, man,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  The guy looked up, bleary-eyed. “Order me a western omelette,” he instructed. His head fell back to the table with an audible thunk.

  They ordered. Neil pulled a handful of napkins from the dispenser and started to clean his glasses. Tom shivered in his undershirt, as if realizing for the first time that his shirt was still back at the bar with the bachelorettes. “Cold,” he said, and gulped coffee. Chris grabbed for his mug.

  “Not yet,” he said. “We didn’t toast!”

  Tom lifted his coffee, brown eyes shining with warmth and alcohol. “To Neil,” he began. “Neil . . . I love you like a brother, and . . . and . . .”

  “Hold up,” said Chris. He extricated his flask from his front pocket and unsteadily dumped whiskey into everyone’s cup. “To the last best night of your life,” he said to Neil.

  Tom looked puzzled. “Last night?” he repeated. “He’s not gonna die. He’s just getting married.”

  “Last best night,” said Chris. “I meant, that this is the last really good time he’ll have.” He thought that over. “The last best night he’ll have when he’s single.” He looked at Neil. “Right?”

  “I guess,” Neil said. He burped. “It’s been pretty wild.”

  “Tell me how you knew,” said Tom suddenly. He planted his elbows on the table and stared at Neil with his bloodshot eyes.

  “How I knew what?”

  “That you wanted to get married,” Tom said, and looked at him expectantly.

  Neil hooked his glasses carefully behind his ears. “Because I love her,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Tom. “But how do you know you’ll still love her in three years or five years?”

  Neil shrugged. “I don’t, I guess,” he said. “I just know what I feel now, and I hope . . . I mean, we get along.”

  Bruce nodded, although he privately subscribed to his girlfriend’s belief that Saturday’s festivities had little to do with love and everything to do with Neil’s finally locating a woman who was both willing to sleep with him and two crucial inches shorter than he was.

  “They get along,” Tom repeated.

  “That’s important,” Chris argued. “That’s, like . . . a basis.”

  “Okay, for now. That’s fine. But what about the future? You f
ind someone, she turns you on, you get along, you spend some time, and before long . . .” Tom set two thick fingers on the table and made a humming noise as he slid them toward the ketchup bottle. “It’s like this!”

  Chris was puzzled. “Love is like your fingers?”

  Tom sighed. “Love is like an escalator. Or one of those moving walkways at the airport. You start going out with someone, and it’s like this unstoppable thing. You go out, you move in, you decide, why not, because you’re getting it every night, and then you’re married, and then it’s five years later, and now you’ve got kids and you have to do kid things with them, and maybe she nags you or maybe she’s fat, or maybe you just want your freedom back.” He paused, swallowing coffee. “Maybe you want to be able to look at a girl on the sidewalk and think, Yeah, it could happen, you could get her number and it could happen, it could work . . .”

  “Tom,” Neil said, placing one of his hands on his friend’s shoulder, “that isn’t happening now.”

  “You’re missing my point! My point is that it could! My point is that any single woman in here, in this, this . . . where are we?”

  Bruce consulted his place mat. “World of Bagels.”

  “Any woman in World of Bagels could be the perfect match for Neil. Any woman in here could be his soul mate. And he’ll never know, because that road is gone.” Tom pulled something from his pocket and began waving it in the air in time with his words. “ ‘Two roads diverged in a wood,’ and you took this one, and you’ll never know about the other road.”

  Bruce squinted and realized that Tom was pointing with a penis-shaped swizzle stick.

  “You’ll never get a chance with . . .” Tom cast his gaze around the bar. A pair of heavyset men sat at the counter, buttocks overflowing their stools, and a waitress old enough to be any of their mothers was squirting the countertop with Windex.