The Guy Not Taken (15 page)

“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 find 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.

“Tom,” Chris said, “that is grim.”

“It’s the truth,” Tom said. “I should know.”

“Why?” asked Neil.

Tom shook his head and gulped from his mug. “I saw my parents,” he said. “I saw how it was for them. They got married when they were both twenty-five, had me, had my sister, Melissa, and it was like they ran out of things to talk about by the time I was six. They were just two people who’d wound up in the same house, sitting across from each other at the same table every night.”

“Did they get divorced?” Bruce asked.

“Whose parents didn’t?” Tom answered. Bruce’s parents didn’t, but he knew better than to interrupt Tom. “My father cheated on her for years. Told her the most stupid lies. Told her he’d be working late, and she believed him. Fucking working late.”

“Did they have fights?” Bruce asked.

Tom shook his head. “Not really. That wasn’t the bad part.” He reached across the table for the sugar and dumped some into his cup. “My dad started smoking again. This was right before he left, when I was, like, thirteen and Missy was ten. He’d take his cigarettes onto the deck and light up right under Missy’s bedroom window. Do you remember how crazy they make you about cigarettes in school . . . how they tell you, like, one puff and it’s instant death, and they show you those pictures of lungs?”

All of the guys at the table, except for the one who’d passed out, nodded. They remembered the pictures of the lungs.

“So he’d be out there and he’d light up, and the smell of the smoke would wake Missy up. She’d lean out her window and ask him to stop. ‘Daddy, don’t. Daddy, stop.’ And he wouldn’t. He’d just smoke and smoke, and she’d be up there crying, and he’d pretend he didn’t hear, until finally he’d just get in his car and leave. Missy thought it was her fault. When he’d go away. She
told me that a long time afterward. That she was the one who made him leave. Because she told him not to smoke.”

The table sat silent, except for the faint snore of the passed-out guy.

“Where’s your sister now?” Bruce asked.

“She lives in the city,” Tom said. “She dropped out of college. She’s mixed up, I guess.” He paused, swallowed spiked coffee. “I think she never got over him leaving. Not really. She never stopped believing that it was her fault.”

Neil took his glasses off and started polishing them again. Bruce thought that they all knew girls like that, girls in trouble. He’d sat across from girls like that in high school and watched them fill their notebooks with stars and hearts and scrolled initials, entwining their first name with the last name of the class president or the quarterback, without writing down a single word of what the teacher said; or they’d seen them in bars, laughing too loudly and drinking too much and leaving with the first guy who’d whisper the word
beautiful.

Chris looked sympathetic as he whispered in Neil’s ear. Neil lifted his orange-juice glass. “To Tom,” he said, “the best man.”

Tom waved the toast off grumpily. But Neil persisted.

“And to Chris, and Bruce, and Steve.” Steve was the passed-out guy, Bruce figured. “Good men.”

Chris liked that. “Mediocre men,” he said, slinging his arm around the groom’s shoulders. “Marginal men.” When the food came, everyone was laughing.

•   •   •

Neil pushed back his plate and looked around the table. “So who’s next?” he asked.

“Next? Not me, man,” said Chris. “I can’t even get a girl to stay around for, like, a week.” This was sort of a lie, because, as good-looking as he was, girls fell in love with him after two
drinks in a bar, but Chris got panicky if they started calling too often, and was usually the one to do the dumping.

“Tom? Nah, don’t even answer,” Neil said hastily.

“The thing is, I’d like to,” said Tom. “I still believe in it. Like, maybe when I’m forty-five, and I don’t want to do it all the time. Then it won’t matter, if she doesn’t want to either.”

“Why don’t you just find a girl who wants to do it all the time now?” asked Neil.

Tom shook his head. “No girl wants to do it all the time. That girl does not exist.”

“So you’ll just wait?” Neil asked.

“That’s what my dad did. I mean, the second time,” Tom said. “After he finally left, he was on his own for a while, then he married this preschool teacher. And she’s pregnant now.”

“You’re gonna be a big brother!” said Chris. “Yeah,” said Tom sourly, shoving his hair behind his ears. “Lucky me.”

“Bruce?”

Bruce looked at his plate, suddenly guilty at the relative tranquility of his own life. His parents had just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary. There were no affairs—at least none that he knew of—and no big fights. His parents still held hands when they walked on the beach; his father still kissed his mother first thing when he came home from work. And they were in agreement on most major issues he could think of: religion (Jewish, semiobservant), politics (Democrat, although his mother seemed to care more than his dad), and their regard for his continuing status as a graduate student (dim—Bruce had gotten adept at changing the subject when the question of his as-yet-unwritten dissertation came up, and after three years his parents had simply quit asking).

And things with Cannie were getting serious. When you
were twenty-eight and had been seeing someone for three years, things either got serious or they ended. At least that’s what she said. “Eventually we’re going to have to move forward, or . . .” She pushed her hands together, then let them slide apart.

Bruce had met Cannie at a party in Philadelphia, the kind of thing where he knew a friend of the hostess, and had nothing to smoke and nothing else to do with his Saturday night. By the time he got there, the party had been in full swing for hours. Cannie’s eyes sparkled as she talked, gesturing with one hand and holding a glass of red wine in the other. People were gathered around her, and Bruce found himself joining the crowd, trying to get close enough to hear what she was saying.

They were in a typically tiny apartment, the room hot and crowded in spite of all the furniture having been pushed back against the walls. They’d spoken for a few minutes by the makeshift bar in the cramped kitchen, and Cannie leaned against him, shouting over the music. He remembered how her lips had grazed his cheek as she told him the most mundane facts—where she’d gone to school, what she did for a living. And he remembered how she’d laughed at his attempts at jokes, touching his forearm with her hand, leaning her head back so he could see the smooth, tanned skin of her throat.

He had tried to make her laugh, but she was really the funny one. “Oh!” she’d said the first time she saw him coming out of the shower. “It’s your reclusive-billionaire bathrobe!” Once, she’d been babbling about some problem at the newspaper where she worked, and he’d put his hand playfully over her mouth, telling her there was only one thing he expected her to open that weekend. She’d looked at him, her eyes sparkling. “What’s that?” she’d asked, her voice muffled and her mouth warm against his palm. “My wallet?”