The Guy Not Taken Page 9

  “All this stuff about dresses,” he grumbled, glaring at the notes we’d been given. “Girls really care that much?”

  I sat back down in my own chair, trying for grace. “Girls do.”

  “You know what we need?” he asked. “Pie. Come on. I’m buying.”

  “But this is due in . . .”

  “We’re not getting anywhere. We’re spinning our wheels. We need a break.” He jingled his car keys in the pocket of his khaki cutoffs that trailed threads down his hairy legs.

  “You look like a lemon meringue kind of girl.”

  I got up and followed him as he did an exaggerated cartoonish tiptoe past the model-slash-receptionist. “I got your back,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he pushed the heavy glass door open and we race-walked into the sunshine of the parking lot. “Head down, head down!” he whispered, opening his car’s door and hustling me inside. “If anyone sees us . . .”

  “It’s curtains?” I said, getting into the spirit.

  “Nah,” he said as the car rumbled to life. “They’d just want pie, too.”

  We moved into a shared office a week later and worked together for the next six months, bouncing ideas off each other, reading dialogue across the table, even acting out the parts. Rob kept balled-up athletic socks in his desk, and he’d shove them down the front of his T-shirt to impersonate Cara, the most improbably endowed of the quartet, who was played by a twenty-four-year-old named Taryn Montaine. Rob swore he recognized her from a softcore porno that still aired late at night on Showtime. “I know it’s her,” he’d said after forty fruitless minutes scouring the Internet for a picture that would prove it. “She just got a new fake name to go with her new fake tits.” When he got bored with searching for pictures of a pre-implant Taryn, he’d look at me with a lazy smile. “You know what you need?” he’d ask. He always did know, whether it was a burrito for lunch or a bag of chips or a butter rum LifeSaver, or a drive to Santa Monica. (Once he rented Rollerblades, and I sat on a bench and laughed at him stumbling around for half an hour.)

  We were together for ten hours a day on normal days, something closer to twenty on the Thursday nights when we’d tape. I still didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew every T-shirt he had in his wardrobe. I knew that his cleaning ladies came on Tuesdays and that he had a poker game every other Friday, that his father had died of emphysema and his mother lived in Arizona. I knew how he looked first thing in the morning (rumpled, tired), and how he looked late at night (more rumpled, more tired, with more stubble). He called me Lemon Meringue, and once or twice he’d actually introduced me as his work wife, making my heart beat like a little girl who’s gotten just what she wanted for her birthday.

  I tugged my goggles back down, flipped over again, and kicked toward the end of the pool, forcing my aching arms high over my head, then knifing them into the water. Five months after we’d written it, the first episode Rob and I had collaborated on was scheduled to air on a Thursday night. My grandmother, who’d been as charmed by Rob as I was, decided a party was in order. She’d invited a bunch of her extra friends over to our apartment, and spent two days making brisket and borscht and potato-and-onion pierogies, covering the dark wood of our dining room table and sideboard with lace doilies, then loading them with platters of food. “A feast fit for a czar,” I’d told her, straightening the plates, filling the ice bucket, too nervous to sit or eat a bite as her senior-citizen friends, with their canes and walkers and snap-brim hats, filed into the living room.

  I’d perched on the edge of one of the dining room chairs, in a pretty pale-green sundress I’d bought for the occasion, counting down the minutes on the VCR’s clock. Rob never showed. I left him three messages—two casual-cool, one desperate. I forced myself to watch the episode; then I’d hidden in my bedroom until the last of the extras, bearing Tupperware containers full of beet soup and sour cream, had gone home. I was under the covers in my sundress and my sandals when my grandmother crept into the room.

  “You came home pretty late last night, Ruthie.”

  I groaned and opened my eyes. She was standing beside me, still dressed for the party in a vintage cocktail caftan, with diamanté hair clips and rhinestone-buckled shoes that clattered on the terra-cotta floors. “Did you sleep with him?” she asked.

  I could hear Boston in her voice, and it made me ache for home as I nodded, too ashamed to say yes. You know what you need? I’d asked Rob the night before, at one in the morning, after we’d finished our script. He’d lifted his shaggy eyebrows. Me, I said, marveling at my own boldness, holding my breath until he grinned and said, Well, Ruthie, I wouldn’t say no. I’d looked straight into his eyes, imagining—oh, it made my insides cringe to think about it—that I was Taryn Montaine as I unbuttoned my blouse, as I crossed the room, knelt, and unzipped his pants. His quick inhalation when my lips had touched him, the way, at the end, he’d groaned my name, all of it had made me think that he was feeling something more than mere gratification, or gratitude; that he was falling in love.

  Afterward, snuggled against him in the Barcalounger, I’d been foolish enough to hope for the impossible: the workplace romance that actually worked. We were good together. Our months as writing partners proved it. And maybe, after one night of bliss on scratchy synthetic tweed, Rob would realize that I was the love of his life, that we belonged together.

  My grandmother sat down next to me and stroked my hair. “Are you okay?” she asked, and I’d nodded again, without knowing whether it was true.

  On Friday I’d gone to the office and Rob hadn’t been there. I accepted congratulations numbly, nodding my thanks, asking everyone if they’d seen him. Nobody had. I spent the weekend in agony, looking at my cell phone every thirty seconds or so, imagining horrible scenarios: Rob dead in a car accident, Rob in a hospital with amnesia, or cancer, or both.

  The show-runner, a twenty-seven-year-old named Steve, called me into his office first thing Monday morning. “So where’s that partner of mine?” I asked with a smile.

  “Sit down,” he suggested. I sat down on an impressive, wildly uncomfortable Lucite and metal chair underneath his Emmys. “Rob and Taryn eloped over the weekend.”

  “He . . . Taryn . . . what?” This was a joke, I thought. Had to be. Rob barely spoke to Taryn during the read-throughs and rehearsals, and when he talked about her, it was usually to make fun of her implants or her pornographic past.

  Steve kept a Magic 8 Ball on his desk (ironically, of course). He picked it up and shook it gently. “I guess she’s pregnant.”

  I nodded numbly. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. I breathed deeply, hoping he wouldn’t see that the blood had drained out of my face. I pictured Rob and Taryn together, his arm around her shoulder, one hand resting lightly on her belly. The little family.

  • • •

  “Hello? Excuse me?”

  I looked up, startled, and sucked water into my nose. The janitor was standing by the side of the pool, pointing at the clock on the white-tiled wall as I coughed and spluttered. “Ten o’clock. We’re closing now.”

  I shook the water out of my ears, took a quick shower, and toweled off, avoiding the ubiquitous mirrors as I pulled on my clothes. On the way home I bought three fish tacos at Poquito Mas, and a chicken burrito for Grandma to eat in the morning. She was asleep when I arrived, snoring on the gold brocade sofa. My plate of flanken, covered in plastic wrap, sat on top of the stove. I put the food in the refrigerator, then eased my grandmother’s legs onto the couch, slipped off her mules, covered her with a blanket, and flicked the television set into silence. My muscles were singing and my head still felt waterlogged. As I tumbled down into sleep, I remembered Caitlyn, the crack I’d made about babysitting. I should get her a book, I thought. Let her look at all the colleges in the country. Let her make a real choice . . . Then I was out.

  • • •

  “Excuse me?”

  I looked up, ready to defend my right to the table I’d onc
e again commandeered at 9:30 on the following Saturday morning. Mostly the screenwriters would just glare and mutter, but occasionally one of them would work up the nerve to walk over and demand to know when I’d be finished. Sorry, I’d say with a sweet and insincere smile. I’m on deadline.

  “Yes?” I said, bracing myself.

  The guy standing in front of me was tall and thin, with curly black hair cut so short I could see flashes of his scalp. He wore jeans and a faded gray long-sleeved T-shirt, and he had hazel eyes, pale skin, and little nick on his chin, probably from shaving, just above his pointy Adam’s apple. “You were in here last week, right?”

  I nodded. Here we go. He was probably going to tell me that hoarding the power outlet for two weeks in a row was such egregiously bad behavior I’d either have to move or he’d get management involved.

  “You’re a writer?”

  I nodded a second time, a little quizzically. Yes, I was a writer. It was pretty safe to assume that anyone in Los Angeles who spent more than an hour sitting in front of a laptop in a coffee shop was a writer.

  “Can I ask what kind of writing you do?”

  “All kinds.”

  I’d left The Girls’ Room with a nice severance check and my tail between my legs nine months before. Since then I’d been between shows, collecting enough unemployment to support myself, and Grandma, in reasonable style. The applications started out as a hobby, something to keep me busy and get me out of the house, but, just lately, I was making real money, with a lot less grief than writing scripts had wound up giving me. No Rob, no writing partners, no late nights or interfering corporate overlords. No complications. I gave the guy a polite smile and flipped open the screen of my computer, bracing myself not for a turf war over my table but for the other inevitable L.A. conversation, the one that started with a question about whether I was working on anything right now and ended with a naked plea for my agent’s name and e-mail address.

  The guy rocked back and forth on his sneakered feet. “You were in here with a girl last week. Dark hair? Pink shirt?”

  Oh, Lord. This was even worse than getting hit up for my agent’s number. “Dark hair? Pink shirt?” I parroted. “I was helping her with her college applications. She’s seventeen.” You perv, I thought, but restrained myself from saying, as I gave him my please-be-gone smile.

  Instead of looking insulted, he smiled back. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Did you help with her essays?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Essays and interviews. I videotape my clients, give them tips on how to present themselves, stuff like that. And I really should get back to work now.” I looked intently at my screen, but he didn’t leave.

  “I’ve got kind of a business proposition for you. May I?” He looked at the other chair. I studied him more carefully.

  “You’re too young to have a kid applying to college.”

  “No kids that I know of,” he said, taking a seat.

  “So . . . you’re applying to grad school?”

  “Nope.” He set his coffee cup on the table. “I’m setting up a profile for an online dating site, but I’m not a great writer. I could use some help.”

  I stared at him, making sure I understood. “You want me to script-doctor your online dating profile.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding and raising his coffee cup in a toast, looking pleased with himself, pleased with me, that I’d gotten the point so quickly. “I just think that, right now, it sounds a little generic. I just sound like anybody. Any guy.”

  “And you’re not.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think I am, but who knows? Maybe I’m wrong.”

  I pulled a notebook out of my purse and flipped to a fresh page. Part of me thought this was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. Another part—the part of me that had been eyeing a little Craftsman bungalow on Sierra Bonita—saw this guy as a potential gateway into a large and lucrative new market. There were only so many college seniors who needed my help and whose parents could afford me, and college apps would keep me busy only through the January 15 deadline. But personal ads were a year-round concern, and there was probably a limitless pool of the lovelorn and vocabulary-challenged who’d be willing to pay . . . let’s see . . .

  “How much work are we talking about?” I asked.

  He’d come prepared. Reaching into a hard-sided backpack, he pulled out a manila folder, and pulled from that three pages. The first one had a screen name (Lonelyguy 78) and a picture of the fellow in front of me, wearing a suit and a tie and a forced, dorky grin.

  I stared down at the picture, then up at him. “Was that, by any chance, the shot they took for your employee ID tag?”

  He squirmed, pulling the cuffs of his shirt down over his wrists. “You can tell? I know it’s not the best picture, but they needed a head shot, and that was the one I had on my computer.”

  I shook my head, then studied his face. He was decent-looking. The photograph didn’t do him credit. “That’s the first thing. Get a new picture. One that doesn’t make you look like a narc.”

  He pulled a pen out of his pocket and wrote the words No narc on the front of the folder. Then he pulled a plastic bag of red pistachios out of his backpack and offered them to me.

  “No thanks,” I said automatically, even though I adored anything salty, pistachios most of all—and of pistachios, my favorite were the ones with dyed shells that stained your fingertips red.

  “You sure?” he asked, holding the open bag toward me.

  “Well, maybe just a few,” I said.

  “Go nuts,” he told me, and smiled. “Joke.”

  “Got it,” I murmured. I picked up my pen and studied the pages he’d given me, zeroing in on his screen name. “ ‘Lonelyguy’? Good Lord. Was ‘Desperateguy’ taken? Or ‘I might kill you and cut up your body in my basement guy’?”

  “They only give you twelve letters for your screen name. What’s wrong with ‘Lonelyguy’?” he asked, offering me more pistachios.

  “It’s a little needy,” I said, and tried not to sigh as my mind flashed to Rob. His confidence, the way he could walk into a room of overcaffeinated writers or anxious executives and lure them toward him with a self-deprecating joke, was what I’d loved most about him. I winced, and mentally swapped “liked” for “loved,” and then downgraded “liked” to “appreciated,” then reminded myself firmly that the most important adjective as far as Rob had been concerned was now, of course, “taken.” I scanned the rest of Lonelyguy’s profile. Turn-ons, turnoffs, preferred body type, hair colors and eye colors he’d consider, as if a woman could be ordered up like a meal at a restaurant, where a diner could swap french fries for mashed potatoes and insist on his dressing on the side.

  Under “my date,” he’d checked off ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. For body types, he was willing to consider “fit” and “slender.” I’d urge him to throw in an “average,” given that plenty of fit and/or slender women—didn’t necessarily see themselves that way.

  “It used to be swim.”

  I looked up, startled. “Huh?”

  “Swim. My screen name. SWM. For Single White Male.” He shook his head, embarrassed. “Talk about generic, right?”

  “Do you like to swim?”

  “Sure. I guess. But nobody here really does it. Have you ever noticed that? People go to Malibu and the only ones in the water are the surfers and the dogs.”

  I nodded. I’d noticed. I’d even bought myself a wet suit and spent a few Sundays bobbing around in the rough waves of the frothy blue-green water, figuring—hoping—I’d look like a surfer who’d lost her board, or, alternately, a dog owner who’d lost her dog.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ruth Saunders.”

  “Ruth the truth,” he said, sweeping the litter of pistachio shells into his empty paper cup.

  “Just Ruth will be fine,” I said, and flipped briskly through the rest of the pages. “Okay, now . . .”

  The sound of Cait
lyn’s high-heeled boots on the hardwood floor made us both look up. “Am I late?” she asked.

  I looked at my watch. Ten a.m.

  “She’s all yours,” said Lonelyguy.

  “Are you trying to get into college?” Caitlyn asked him.

  “No, he’s trying to get into women’s . . .” I stopped myself before I could say pants.

  “Hearts,” he said with a charming smile. “I’m Gary, by the way.”

  “Caitlyn,” she said, smiling back. I sat there (“Like a lox!” I could hear my grandmother moan) while they eyed each other appreciatively. It made me wonder why Gary the Lonelyguy was lonely in the first place. Clearly, he wasn’t having any trouble with Caitlyn.

  Eventually Gary picked up his backpack. “Do you have anything free later today, Ruth?”

  My last applicant was at one. “Would two o’clock work?”

  “I’ll be back,” he said. “Do you have a card or something?” I did, a very nice one, with my e-mail address, and the words application counselor beneath my name. My grandmother had had them printed up at Kinko’s the month before.

  Gary slipped the card in his pocket, raised his coffee cup in another toast, and then was gone.

  “Huh,” said Caitlyn. “Cute.” She reached into the tiny purse she’d carried last time and extracted a wad of paper that, once unfolded sixteen times, turned out to be her essay.

  I sipped my coffee and read it through while Caitlyn wandered off to provision herself with a smoothie. “For a California girl, spending two weeks in Paris was a truly transformative experience,” it began. Stifling a yawn, I arranged my face into a pleasant expression and broke things to Caitlyn as gently as I could when she came back with her cup.

  “It’s very competent,” I began. “Very smoothly written.”

  She took a slurp of her smoothie. “So that’s good?” She slipped off her cropped denim jacket, revealing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. Had the Flashdance look come back again? Had I missed it? I made a mental note to see if she was wearing leg warmers.