The Guy Not Taken Page 8
“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.
• • •
“College was terrific,” I told Caitlyn, and then, unable to help myself, I cupped my cheek with my palm.
She flicked her phone open and shut, open and shut, “I don’t know,” she said. “Berkeley’s so big? Every time I go there with my parents, I just feel . . .” Her voice trailed off. She put the phone into her tiny pink purse and slid her cup across the table, shifting if from her left hand to her right, then back again. “Lost?”
“You’ll make friends,” I said.
She shrugged.
“Well, have you thought about other options? Maybe a smaller campus?”
“My parents,” she said. The sour little smirk on her pink lips made her look much older than seventeen. “They’re, like, obsessed. They both went there, you know.”
“They mentioned it,” I acknowledged.
Caitlyn bent her head and nibbled at a ragged fingertip. “I don’t know,” she said again.
“Well, maybe you should make an appointment with your school’s guidance counselor. We’re still early in the process, you know. It’s not to
o late to change your mind.”
She nodded, looking unconvinced. “Next Saturday I’ll give you back the application. We’ll go over it together, and I’ll take a look at your personal statement.”
“Can I ask you something?” I felt my shoulders stiffen. After all this time, I’d developed a pretty good sense as to when strangers were going to pop the question.
“Sure.”
She swung one long leg over the other. “When you asked about volunteer work? I take care of my little brother sometimes? But it’s not, like, an official thing.”
“Well, that’s nice of you, but I don’t think babysitting’s going to impress the admissions committee too much,” I said, as gently as I could.
A pink flush crept up from her neck to her jawline. “Oh. Okay.”
“But we could put it in there anyhow. It couldn’t hurt.” She nodded, once, a princess dismissing a serf. Then she tucked her little purse under her arm and loped through the coffee shop, out to her fancy car with the Berkeley logo wrapped around the license plate. I wondered whether her parents paid her for the inordinate hardship of tending to her sibling. I bet myself that they did.
• • •
“So?” called my grandmother from her bedroom that night. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I said, setting down my laptop and piling my folders next to the bowl of wax fruit on our kitchen table, a heavy clawfooted mahogany thing that had looked much more at home in our four-bedroom colonial in Massachusetts than it did in our two-bedroom apartment in Hancock Park. I’d made it through five applicants that day, including an hour-long session with a boy who believed fervently—and, in my opinion, mistakenly—that he was going to get into Tufts, even though he had a B-minus average and had been suspended his sophomore year for selling oregano to his gullible classmates at a school dance. I rolled my shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension, as my grandmother shuffled into view, wearing her customary after-six attire: a lace-trimmed peach satin negligee, leopard-print mules, and Queen Helene’s Mint Julep Mud Masque, which, she swore, kept her looking not a day over sixty. She looked like Miss Havisham in blackface. Greenface.
She teetered across the linoleum over to the stove. “Flanken?”
“I’ll grab something on my way back from the pool,” I said. We’d been in Los Angeles for years now, but my grandmother still persisted in cooking like it was Christmas in New England and we were expecting a hockey team or two to show up for dinner. She’d regularly prepare flanken with kasha and bow ties, or clam chowder and peppery cheddar-cheese biscuits. At least once a month, she’d stuff an entire leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary and wrestle it on the little hibachi on our tiny tiled porch.
I went to my bedroom for my gym bag. Grandma followed me in, a plate in her hands, concern on her face.
“Ruthie, when do you think you’ll start writing again?”
“I’m writing,” I protested, folding a pair of jeans and a black sleeveless turtleneck into my bag.
“Fixing college applications for spoiled rich kids is not writing, Ruth Anne.” First and middle name. She wasn’t messing around. When she set the plate down beside my bed, the minty scent of her mud mask mixed with the smell of buckwheat, onion gravy, and roasted meat.
“It pays the bills,” I said.
“It’s not what you want,” she said.
“And where is it written that I get what I want?”
She grabbed my shoulders with her skinny hands and kissed my cheek, smearing me with green minty slime. “I wrote that,” she said, and kissed me again, and shooed me out the door.
• • •
I belong to one of Los Angeles’s super-trendy fitness hot spots, a club on Wilshire Boulevard with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the cardio floor overlooking the bumper-to-bumper backup of luxury automobiles. It’s expensive, especially because I don’t take any of the fancy classes, or use the tanning booths or the sauna or the steamroom, or drop off my dry cleaning at their in-house facility, or hang out and surf the Internet in the juice bar. I was there only for the pool, and the pool was almost always empty, and probably would continue to be until an enterprising Angeleno invented some underwater regimen guaranteed to lengthen, strengthen, and eradicate cellulite.
I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my black tank suit, and tugged on my cap and my goggles while I stood under the running water. In Massachusetts, we’d belonged to the JCC. Over their Olympic-size pool was a quote from the Talmud, rendered in blue and green tile: Some say a parent should teach a child to swim. Here, all the tiles were blinding white, the better for beautiful gym-goers to glimpse their reflections glimmering back at them. No Talmud. I held my breath and did a shallow dive into the deep end. I started off slowly, getting used to the water, pointed toes fluttering, arms pushing against the resistance. Breaststroke first, to warm up, ten easy laps with racing turns at each end of the pool. Once my muscles were loose, I’d move into the crawl, and maybe throw in some butterfly if the spirit moved me. It was Saturday night. My fellow fitness buffs had already finished their workouts while I was in the coffee shop grappling with big dreams and bad prose.
After eighty laps, I pushed my goggles up onto my forehead and rolled onto my back, doing a lazy backstroke down the length of the pool and staring at the ceiling. More white tiles; no windows, and no sky.
My grandmother and I had moved out west when I was twenty-three and she was seventy. She wanted warm weather, and a chance to live near the movie stars, in what she routinely referred to, without any irony whatsoever, as the Glamour Capital of the World. I wanted to be a writer—movies, sitcoms, jokes, maybe even greeting cards if things got desperate. Los Angeles felt like the place to be.
We’d sold the house in Framingham—the one where I’d lived with my parents, before the accident, and where I’d lived with my grandmother for twenty years after that. At her insistence, we’d shipped almost every piece of furniture crosscountry. I’d packed up the kitchen, the plates and pots and pans. She packed the photo albums, the precious handfuls of pictures of her daughter and son-in-law and me. “The Little Family,” my mother had written across the back of one of the shots. Her name was Cynthia, and she’d been so beautiful, with pale blue eyes and hair that fell from a widow’s peak high on her forehead. My father wore aviator sunglasses and had a goatee. I was usually snuggled somewhere between them, one thumb corkscrewed firmly in my mouth, my eyes wide and startled, one plump little starfish hand always touching one of them—my father’s shoulder, my mother’s hair.
My grandmother and I found a cozy apartment in a Spanish-style building in Hancock Park, with a tiled fountain tinkling in the lobby, terra-cotta floors, and high plaster arches dividing the rooms. Grandma signed up with a few of the agencies that hired extras for TV shows and movies, and worked three days a week. Just about every medical drama needed a few senior citizens to stick in the hospital beds for the background shots, and it made her enough money to kick in for the rent and, as she put it, keep herself in heels.
After a year of temping during the daytime and writing spec scripts at night, I found an agent. Three months after that, I landed a job writing for an hour-long drama (but a drama with jokes, our bosses anxiously insisted) called The Girls’ Room, which was about four best friends at a boarding school in some unnamed town in New England. The show achieved the near-impossible by (a) actually getting picked up by a network, and (b) not getting canceled after it failed to crack the Nielsen top twenty in its first three weeks. The suits told us they wanted to give us time to find our way, to build an audience. They were giving us a chance.
Then one of the other writers, Robert Curtis—Robert with the crinkles at the corner of his eyes and the black hair laced with gray, Robert who smiled so rarely that you’d find yourself trying everything in your power to get to see him do it—parked himself in the chair next to mine during read-through one morning and asked if I’d help him with the scene he was working on. He leaned close to me and ke
pt his voice low as he confided, “I’m having trouble thinking like a teenage girl.” His incisors were crooked, one was longer than the other, which only served to make him more adorable.
Rob was a few years older than I was, and he’d worked on three other shows before landing in The Girls’ Room, which, oddly enough, was written by a staff of three women and eighteen men. “You’ve never had a writing partner?” he asked me that first day, leaning back in the fantastically ugly orange-and-gold-plaid Barcalounger that someone had placed (ironically, of course) in the corner of the gray-carpeted writers’ room, where it always smelled like garlic salami and dirty feet. “You want to give it a try?”
I nodded. I liked the way he looked at me, the questions he’d ask about where I’d come from, the way he’d slide a Diet Coke across the table when we worked late into the night, anticipating down to the second when I’d need a fresh can. I liked the big black plastic glasses he wore, and his rusty Karmann Ghia, and the way he honestly didn’t seem to care at all what anyone thought of him (which, of course, made everyone like him, and want him to like them, too).
The first thing we wrote together was a prom scene, where Cara, one of the four girls of The Girls’ Room, accepts two different invitations to two different proms, while Elise, her roommate, doesn’t get invited at all and agrees to stand in for Cara at one of the dances. “This is nonsense, isn’t it?” Rob asked, tossing his empty coffee cup into the trash can after six hours and four drafts.
“Don’t ask me,” I said, stretching and yawning (after six hours and four drafts, my self-consciousness had faded, right along with my Dermablend). “I never went to the prom.”
“My school didn’t even have one,” he told me.
“Where’d you go? Some military academy?”
“Swiss boarding school,” he said.
I stared at him. I thought he was kidding, but with Rob, you could never be sure. I didn’t know a single thing about his history: not where he’d grown up, not where he lived now, not whether he was married or involved with anyone.