The Guy Not Taken (17 page)

“You’re in love with your real estate man,” said Namita. It sounded like an accusation.

“We’re not in love,” Jess said, but she couldn’t keep herself from bouncing a bit as she slid off her stool and looked at her watch again, calculating exactly how long it would take her to get back home, to Billy. “We’re just testing the waters.”

“Lord, lord,” said Namita, tilting her cheek for a kiss. “Same time next week?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jess said. She pulled her hat over her brown curls and headed for the C train and the Emerson, her two-bedroom, two-bathroom triple-mint gem of an apartment with high ceilings and original oak floors and an actual working wood-burning fireplace.

•   •   •

The first time Jess passed through the art-deco doors of the Emerson, she was eight years old, a shy girl with unruly hair and glasses. Her parents had sent her to New York City to spend Halloween with Aunt Catherine. Jess had always been a little
afraid of her great-aunt, who’d made no secret of the fact that she had no use for small children. “Sticky hands,” Jess had once heard her say. “Even the cutest among them seems to have sticky hands.” Aunt Cat had snow-white hair and cool blue eyes and, in the high heels she favored, she was as tall as Jess’s father. Unlike the grandmothers Jess knew, cheerful dumpling-shaped ladies in pastel pantsuits, Aunt Cat was always elegant in her tweed pants, with a silk scarf elaborately knotted at her throat. But that first night she’d greeted Jess inside the Emerson’s imposing marble foyer wearing a turquoise-and-gold silk sari.

“Where’d you get that?” Jess had asked.

“India,” said her aunt, as if it were obvious. She had pearls twisted in her hair and a bright plastic pumpkin dangling from her wrist. “Here,” she said, handing Jess the pumpkin. “For your candy.” Jess had suddenly felt very ordinary in her tutu and ballet slippers. Unable to decide between being a witch, a princess, or a punk rocker, she’d wound up with no costume at all and had been forced to wear last year’s ballet clothes. She surreptitiously wiped her hands on her tights to make sure they weren’t sticky.

Upstairs, in the grand, high-ceilinged apartment, with its shiny, wide-planked dark wood floors and no television set anywhere Jess could see, Aunt Cat had given Jess a pair of wings made of wire and pale-pink mesh. She’d clipped a pair of gold chandelier-style earrings to Jess’s earlobes, and she’d used a tube of tinted mousse she’d pulled out from underneath the bathroom sink to give Jess’s mousy hair a pinkish-gold sheen. “Did you buy that special for me?” Jess had asked shyly, and Aunt Cat had given her a mysterious smile and said that it was always useful for a woman to have a few disguises lying around. “When you get older, you’ll understand.”

She led her great-niece down the long, green-carpeted corridors
of the Emerson, and every door they knocked on was opened by someone smiling—the young couple two floors down; the two handsome young men in 8-C (“This is Steven, and this is his husband, Carl,” Aunt Cat had said so matter-offactly that it never occurred to Jess to ask how men could be married to each other); tiny, wizened Mrs. Bastian, who lived in the efficiency on Aunt Cat’s floor between the elevator and the trash chute. Everyone knew Jess’s name, and everyone had treats. Mostly they offered the normal, miniature Halloween-size bars, but at least once per floor Jess would score a candy apple or a box of taffy or a big bar of chocolate, wrapped in gold and silver foil, filled with raspberries or studded with hazelnuts, with a name that Jess had never heard of: Lindt or Callebaut or Recchiuti. “Very nice,” Aunt Cat said later, inspecting Jess’s haul, which Jess had laid out, organized first by size and then by category, on Aunt Cat’s richly patterned fringed Oriental rug. Jess fell asleep that night with the taste of that marvelous bittersweet chocolate ringing in her mouth, and her hair stiff with mousse. The next morning, Aunt Cat ran a bath in her deep tiled tub and stared thoughtfully at Jess through the scented steam.

“I wonder,” she began, “whether you’d like to stay the rest of the weekend?”

Jess had eagerly agreed. They’d gone for a walk in Central Park, had a dim sum brunch at the Nice Restaurant in Chinatown, and cooked a chicken potpie from scratch, rolling out the pastry on a heavy marble cutting board, blanching the peas and carrots and whisking in the cream as a woman, who Jess later learned was Nina Simone, sang softly from the record player.

On Sunday morning, Jess had gone back to New Jersey with a plastic-wrapped slice of potpie, her pumpkin full of candy, a standing invitation to visit whenever she wanted, and a secret
ambition: to grow up and live in New York City, preferably in the Emerson, in an apartment with a green velvet couch and a tiled bathtub deep enough to swim in, to grow up and be just like glamorous, mysterious, elegant Aunt Cat.

•   •   •

When Jess met Charming Billy, her first thought was that he was another treat the Emerson had produced for her, as sweet and irresistible as one of those long-ago chocolate bars. She’d come home from her errands one windy Saturday afternoon in October and found him sitting by the elevator, just beside Mrs. Bastian’s apartment. There was a battered briefcase on one side of him, a blue folder in his lap, and a graphic novel in his hands. As she’d stepped off the elevator, he’d closed his book, gotten to his feet, and looked at her hopefully. “You’re not by any chance here to look at the apartment, are you?”

She’d shaken her head. “I’ve already got one,” she said, shifting her dry cleaning from one arm to the other as she reached for her keys.

“Lucky you. It’s an amazing building. Great location. You’re, what? Three blocks from the subway stop?”

“Two,” said Jess.

He put the book in his pocket and consulted his cell phone. “No signal,” he murmured. Jess could have told him that. No matter who your carrier was, cell phones didn’t work inside the Emerson. As he turned the phone off, then on again, Jess saw that he was in his early thirties, maybe a few years older than she was, and a few inches taller, with a round, amiable face and a deep cleft in the center of his chin. Under his bulky coat she could make out the broad-shouldered, thick-legged build of a wrestler, and a crest of dark hair protruding from his shirt collar. “Any chance I could use your phone?” He had a faint Bronx accent, and his blue-gray scarf matched the color of his eyes.

She paused. He rummaged through his pockets and handed her a business card. His name was William Gurwich, and he was a broker with the Hallahan Group—or at least he had a business card saying so.

“I swear I’m not a psycho killer,” Billy had said, offering Jess the first of the charming smiles that had earned him his nickname. “Of course, if I was a psycho killer, I’d probably say that, too, right?” He sighed, and slumped against the wall.

“You’re selling Mrs. Bastian’s place?” Jess asked.

“That’s the plan,” said Billy. “I was supposed to meet someone here at three.”

“Don’t you have a key?” Jess asked.

“Oh, I do. The thing is . . .” He shoved his hands in his pockets, leaned close to Jess, and lowered his voice. “It kind of smells like cat in there, and I’m allergic to cats. It was easier to wait outside.”

She nodded, noticing his watery eyes, the reddened tip of his nose.

“Anyhow, it looks like I’ve been stood up.”

“Hang on,” said Jess. She put his card in her pocket, carried her dry cleaning and groceries into her apartment, pulled her cordless phone off the kitchen counter, and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” he’d said. He left a message, sneezed twice, and gave her the telephone back. “I’m going to give it twenty more minutes. That’s fair, right?”

“I think so,” she told him . . . and then, because he didn’t seem dangerous, and because she couldn’t think of a reason why not to, she said, “Would you like to wait here? No cats. And we can leave the door open in case your appointment shows up.”

His smile lit up his face. “That’s really nice of you. What’s your name?”

She told him while he draped his coat over one of her dining
room chairs. He helped her hang her dry cleaning and unload the groceries. “Wow,” he’d said, taking in the apartment, the living room windows, the crown moldings and high ceilings, the ornate tilework in the bathroom. “You’re here all by yourself?”

“All by myself,” she told him, thinking that she’d never been so glad that it was true. She made coffee, and they sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, where Billy filled her in on his plans to find a buyer for Mrs. Bastian’s four-hundred-square-foot efficiency that overlooked an airshaft and, in spite of the ministrations of a professional cleaning crew, still smelled like a litterbox.

“That’s it,” he’d said, setting down his coffee cup and looking at the clock on Jess’s kitchen wall. “Half an hour. It’s official. She’s not coming.” He picked up his coat and looked at Jess. “You want to go get some dinner?”

There was a Middle Eastern restaurant down the street, and over the next six weeks, that became their place. They’d meet there and share plates of hummus and falafel on Saturday nights that would sometimes begin with an appointment at Mrs. Bastian’s apartment and would sometimes include a movie, and would always end back at the Emerson, first with long clinches in the foyer and then in the high, soft bed that had once been Aunt Cat’s. After they’d made love, Billy would hold her, his chest against her back, his legs fitted into her own. Five minutes later he’d be asleep, flat on his back and snoring softly, sprawled in the center of the bed. Jess would prop herself up on her elbow and look at his face by the light that filtered in through the curtains, thinking that she had exactly the life she wanted: the right job, the right home, and, best of all, the right man to share it with.

The one problem that had emerged in their three-month relationship
was Billy’s failure to sell a single piece of real estate. Of course, being a broker wasn’t his dream. He wanted to write. He had an MFA from Columbia. He carried a notebook with him everywhere in case his Muse spoke, and he had published a half-dozen short stories in literary magazines that you couldn’t find on any newsstand but which were, he assured Jess, very prestigious nevertheless. Twice, when she’d met him at the restaurant, she found him frowning and muttering at
The New Yorker,
shaking his head over the names he knew, guys who were no-talent hacks and women who were probably sleeping with important editors.

So far, he’d accrued eighteen rejection letters from
The New Yorker,
twelve from
The Paris Review,
and at least six each from
Esquire, GQ,
and
Playboy.
He hadn’t gotten so much as a nibble on Mrs. Bastian’s apartment. He had been given a warning during his last performance review at Hallahan, and if he couldn’t sell something soon, chances were, he’d be let go.

“It’s not your fault,” Jess soothed him. “It’s the economy.” (She’d made a point to start reading the
Times
real estate and business sections since she’d met him.)

He shook his big head sadly. “It’s a buyer’s market, and I’m not selling.” That was when the plan had first occurred to her. He was her guy. They were in love. Love meant sacrifice, and what could she give him that meant more than her apartment? Or, at least, the listing for the apartment, which would probably be enough to impress his bosses so they’d keep him on until he got a real big break. She would roll the dice, she would risk it all. And, of course, she’d be careful to stop things before they went too far. Unlike Cinderella, she’d keep an eye on the time, and she’d know exactly when to leave the ball.

Jess ran down the stairs to the subway station and hopped aboard the train the instant before the doors slid shut. It
was risky, and audacious, and possibly insane. Aunt Cat, she thought, would have approved.

•   •   •

The Emerson was a big brick battleship of a turn-of-the-century building that stood on the corner of 89th Street and Riverside Drive. It fit into its neighborhood, and the city at large, as if Manhattan had been built up around it. Jess, on the other hand, had slowly and painfully realized that she barely fit into New York at all.

She’d spent the steamy summer after college graduation dragging herself from one publishing house and magazine office to another, trying to make herself appear more desirable than the hundreds of other recent graduates who were competing for the same handful of entry-level openings. Aunt Cat’s place would have been Jess’s refuge, but her great-aunt had gone to Venice for the summer, subletting her apartment to an art historian who worked at Columbia, so Jess couldn’t do anything more than occasionally walk past the Emerson, gazing wistfully into the cool marble foyer on her way to or from another horrible interview. At the end of the day, she’d take the bus back to Montclair, New Jersey, and the house that had once been her parents’ and was now just her mother’s, feeling bruised and bewildered, as if New York was a giant treadmill and she couldn’t walk fast enough to keep from falling off.

No matter what she did or how careful she tried to be, she was forever getting elbowed on the subway, or yelled at on the sidewalk, or stumbling into some glaring hardbody in spandex at the midtown gym where Namita dragged her twice a week. “Speak up!” the turbaned guy who manned the coffee cart on the corner would beseech her when she tried to order her buttered hard roll. “Can’t hear you!” the teenager with the three-inch lacquered fingernails who ran the cash register at her favorite salad bar would say.

After six miserable weeks, she’d landed a job at
eBiz
magazine, a prestigious position that, unfortunately, paid only enough for her to spend seven hundred dollars a month on rent. In New York City, that meant one of three things: multiple roommates in an illegally divided one-bedroom somewhere in Manhattan; one roommate in a decent place in one of the boroughs; or, cost-effective but worst of all, taking up permanent residence with her mother, Gloria, in New Jersey, along with Gloria’s bad-tempered Pekingese, Saturday-night Jdates, and subsequent Sunday-through-Thursday despair.

Jess spent the month of August crashing on Namita’s couch, in the apartment Namita shared with her cousin, investigating Options One and Two in a desperate attempt to avoid Option Three, when word came, via the Columbia professor, that Aunt Cat had died in Italy.