The Guy Not Taken Read online

  In the bedroom, Nicki wriggled out of her skirt, shucked her sweater, pulled on a tank top and pink flannel pajama bottoms, and flopped happily onto the bed with her champagne and the telephone. “Hello, room service?” she said. I picked her clothes up off the floor and hung them neatly in the closet. “Two cheeseburgers, an order of french fries, a hot fudge sundae, only please don’t put the hot fudge on the sundae, um, one Heineken . . .” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Josie, what do you want?”

  “Ice water.”

  “One chocolate malted and two Heinekens,” said Nicki, hanging up. She grabbed the television remote off the bedside table. I pulled off my own clothes and slipped on a hotel robe, feeling anxious and antsy and strangely sad. There was nothing left for me to do. My dress had been steamed and hung on the back of the closet door, my hose and shoes and various constricting undergarments laid out carefully on a bench beside it. My pores had been squeezed, my bikini line waxed. My apartment was cleaned and locked up, and my cat boarded for the next ten days. I wouldn’t have much to do but show up on time, strap myself into the big white dress, say “I do” at the appropriate moment, and remember the steps to the dance David and I had rehearsed.

  “We need to talk,” said Nicki. She grabbed my hands and tugged me to the bed. “Now, Josie,” she said. “I don’t want to frighten you, but there’s something you should know before tomorrow.”

  I wriggled away to pull my suitcase out of the closet, heaving it onto the bed and starting an inventory. Swimsuit, SPF 45 for my body, SPF 30 for my face, sun hat, sandals . . . “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “David has a snake.”

  “Huh?”

  “A snake,” she repeated. “And the snake wants to hide in your cave.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I muttered, carrying my cosmetic case into the bathroom. Toothpaste, toothbrush, mouthwash, dental floss . . .

  “Don’t be afraid!” Nicki yelled. “The snake means you no harm!” She lifted the champagne bottle and took a healthy swallow. “You must welcome the snake in order to be a good wife.”

  “I’ll do that,” I told her. I grabbed my razor out of the shower. When I turned around again Nicki was standing right behind me, smiling at me in the mirror.

  “The snake will go in and out of the cave, and in and out and in and out and in and out . . .” She waved the bottle back and forth to suit the words.

  “Okay,” I said, and held out my hands for the champagne. Nicki ignored me.

  “And then!” she said, starting to giggle. “It’s going to spit up!”

  I picked up the telephone. Room service greeted me with “Hello, Mrs. Epstein!” It took me a minute to realize that Mrs. Epstein was meant to be me. “Hi, can we add a pot of coffee to our order?”

  Room service said no problem. Nicki giggled some more and hoisted herself onto the bed.

  “I’m only telling you things you need to know,” she said.

  “Believe me, I’m grateful.” I zipped up the suitcase and laid down beside my sister, who’d flopped on her belly to channel surf.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “Nah,” I lied. “Piece of cake.”

  The food arrived. Nicki draped a towel over the bed, then set out each of the plates, lifting the silver lids with a flourish. “A prenuptial picnic!”

  I told her I wasn’t hungry. She waved her cheeseburger under my nose, fingers sinking into the soft seeded bun. “Just one bite,” she wheedled, the way my mother used to coax her to eat when she was little. I shrugged, tried to take the tiniest bite I could manage, and groaned out loud as my teeth cracked the charred crust of the burger and the rich juices spilled into my mouth.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” I breathed, and gobbled a fistful of crisp french fries dipped in herbed mayonnaise. “If I don’t fit into that dress tomorrow . . .”

  “You’ll fit,” my sister promised. I drank a third of a beer in one gulp, then burped, wiped my lips, and licked salt and melted cheese off my fingertips. Five minutes later, I’d demolished the burger and was slowly spooning fudge over the dish of vanilla ice cream, promising myself that I’d skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

  “How’s work?” Nicki asked.

  “Okay,” I said through a mouthful of ice cream. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at the Associated Press offices, which meant I worked nights and weekends, running off to fires or car crashes or pier collapses, usually in bad neighborhoods where the witnesses were happy to give colorful, profanity-laced quotes about whatever they’d just seen, but clammed up when you asked for their names. “Call me Little Ray,” a guy who’d been the single survivor of a six-car crash on Roosevelt Boulevard said the week before.

  I’d patiently explained that the AP required both a first and a last name—preferably the ones he’d been born with. (“But everybody calls me Little Ray!” he’d insisted.)

  I liked the work, though, and I liked writing, but two weeks into my tenure I’d done the math and realized that if I’d been making five hundred dollars less a year, I would have qualified for food stamps. It was a problem, given the student-loan situation. I dreamed of making more money, but so far the only thing I’d been able to think of doing was dropping out of journalism and going into advertising, where you could do quite well, if you didn’t mind using your talent and creativity to sell tampons (for some reason, I was convinced that, no matter what city I worked in or which agency hired me, I would end up with the word absorbent figuring prominently in my future).

  Of course I’d soon be a married woman, and David was set to start working as a venture capital consultant, which would be considerably more lucrative than my career as a cub reporter. Maybe I’d get promoted. Maybe David would make a killing. Maybe I could get my loans paid off on time. Early, even. Say, when I turned fifty.

  Nicki watched girls in hot pants gyrating to rap songs where every third word was bleeped out while I polished off the ice cream. Then she reached over me for the phone. “Hello, room service? We’re going to need another burger,” she said in the same tone that the ship’s captain in Jaws, upon glimpsing the great white shark, had said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

  “No more,” I protested, sucking the last traces of chocolate off the spoon. “Seriously. I might explode.”

  “Fine,” said Nicki. “I’ll eat it myself.”

  In the bathroom, I took a twenty-minute shower in a stall that had half a dozen jets protruding from the tiled walls. I scrubbed myself with lemon-scented soap and washed my hair with rosemary mint shampoo. At the sink, swathed in a hotel bathrobe, I brushed and flossed, rinsed and spat, patted astringent and moisturizer onto my face, and considered my reflection. Things were as good as they were going to get. My eyebrows weren’t lopsided, my complexion was clear, my teeth and hair were shiny. If I were a horse, I’d do just fine on the auction block.

  I pulled on my ugliest, oldest, most comfortable flannel nightshirt, tiptoed through the darkened bedroom, made sure the comforter was free of food and dishes, and slipped into bed next to my sister.

  She rolled over instantly and tried to spoon me.

  “Get off!” I whispered, wriggling away.

  “Oh, Josie,” she giggled, her skinny arms around my neck, “your nightshirt is driving me wild!”

  “Stay on your side of the bed or you’ll be sleeping in the closet,” I said.

  Nicki was quiet for all of thirty seconds. “Do you think Leon was a virgin before he met Mom?” she asked.

  “Nicki,” I said, “that is really not what I need to be thinking about right now.”

  My sister was undeterred. “I mean, he was her student.”

  “Student teacher,” I said. It was a distinction I’d made many times in the two years since our fifty-six-year-old mother had taken up with a twenty-four-year-old.

  “So young,” said Nicki. “Too young.”

  “Not another word,” I told her.

  “Fine,” she grumbled, rolling on her side an
d falling almost instantly asleep.

  I shifted around in the big, high bed. It was 11:03 at night. T minus sixteen hours until my date with the white, tight, fitted satin, ridiculously expensive dress that hung over the back of the closet door like a ghost.

  By 11:36 I had heartburn. By 11:38 I had doubts. By midnight I’d convinced myself that marriage in general, and David in particular, were bad ideas, and that the true love of my life was really Craig Patterson. I’d gone to high school with Craig, but we’d never actually spoken until our fifth reunion, when he’d followed me into the coatroom and slurred that I had the prettiest tits of all the girls in our class. Then he’d shoved his phone number in my pocket and lurched off toward the ballroom where, I heard later, he’d gotten sick in a potted plant.

  At 12:15 I crept out of bed and stared at the empty streets around Rittenhouse Square, watching the lone traffic light tint the pavement green and yellow and red and green again. The treetops bent in the wind, and rain spattered against the windows. Was rain on a wedding day good luck? Bad luck? Nothing special? I couldn’t remember.

  At 12:30 I picked up the telephone. Craig’s number was still in my wallet, on the napkin where he’d written it. I held my breath as I dialed his number. The telephone rang twice, then a woman picked it up. “Hello?”

  My tongue turned to lead. “Hello-ooo?” the woman called. “Anybody there?”

  “Sorry, wrong number,” I blurted. I hung up the phone and took a few minutes to get my heart rate under control. Then I got back into bed and lay there, staring at the elaborate swags of the canopy, thinking about happy endings. Did I know anyone who’d had one? Not my parents, although these days my mother did seem pretty blissed out with young Leon. Not David’s, either, I suspected. His father’s eyes lingered on any woman older than fourteen and younger than forty, and his mother started sipping Sancerre at around four o’clock every afternoon and continued drinking right up until dinner, when she’d switch to vodka, toy with her food, and surreptitiously tug the flesh under her chin or pinch the skin of her upper arms, as if she was already planning her next plastic surgery.

  But even so. I’d been at David’s parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary party, where they’d danced to “Fly Me to the Moon.” His father had dipped his mother backward on her high heels, whispering into her ear, and she’d thrown her head back, laughing, and I’d thought, maybe a little sentimentally, that that was what love looked like. Even my parents, before my father had left and my mother had spent years in a chlorine-scented fog before emerging on Leon’s arm, once had their moments. I remembered my father coming home from work, immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, setting his combination-lock briefcase down by the door and holding his arms open. “Wife!” he would call, and my mother would drop whatever she’d been doing and find him. They would stand there in the hallway next to the washer and the dryer, sometimes for just an instant, sometimes for much longer, holding on to each other at the end of the day.

  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 l
ook 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.

  SWIM

  The 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.