The Guy Not Taken (8 page)

“What died in here?” my sister demanded as she breezed into the honeymoon suite with two giant suitcases and my mother in tow. Nicki parked the suitcases by the door, marched through the living room, and flung herself into the center of the canopied king-size bed.

“So this is it?” she asked, bouncing up and down on the green-and-gold-silk comforter. “The wedding bed? The place where you will grant David your final favor?” She rubbed the corner of a pillowcase between her fingers. “Nice thread count. Too bad you’ll ruin the sheets with your virginal blood.”

“Please get off the bed,” I said. “What are you doing here, anyhow? Isn’t your room ready?”

My mother set the Playmate cooler she’d packed for the trip from Connecticut to Philadelphia down on the coffee table and wandered over to the window. It was my favorite time of year. Red and gold leaves were swirling in the air, brilliant against the bright blue sky. The stores along Walnut Street had pumpkins in their windows, and the air was crisp, with a cidery tang.

“Yes,” said Nicki. “Well. About that.”

My heart sank along with my blood sugar. “Your room’s not ready?”

“Not at the moment,” said Nicki, piling the pillows underneath her head.

“But you do have a room?”

Mom sat on the cream-colored armchair. When she flipped the cooler open, the sulfurous reek of hard-boiled eggs filled the room. “Who wants a snack?”

“Nobody’s hungry,” I said. “Nicki, what’s going on? I sent you the information months ago! You were supposed to call and give them David’s last name . . .”

“I got busy,” my sister snapped.

“You can’t stay here!”

She stared at me, brown eyes wide underneath meticulous eyebrows and layers of mascara. “Well, duh. I’m not planning on crashing your wedding night.” She bounded off the bed, bent over the larger of her two suitcases, and started unzipping. “It would just be for tonight.”

“Uh-uh. No way. Not happening.” I looked at my mother desperately. She fiddled with her cooler, then took off her loose green linen jacket and hung it over the chair at the desk. “Do something!”

“Seriously,” said Nicki, opening her suitcase and extracting
her bridesmaid’s dress, which appeared to have gotten radically shorter and much more low-cut since we’d picked it out together a few months before. “Open a window. Light a match. Anything.”

I followed my sister into the marble foyer of the suite. “You can’t stay here. I’m the bride. I’m supposed to be alone the night before my wedding.”

“No,” said Nicki, smoothing an invisible wrinkle on her skirt before giving it a final shake and hanging it in the closet. “That’s not true. I checked the etiquette book. You’re not supposed to see your husband the night before the wedding. It didn’t say anything at all about siblings.”

“Siblings?” I said faintly. Just then Jon, broad-shouldered and crew-cut, in camouflague pants and a black T-shirt, came barreling through the door. He dropped his army-issue duffel bag beside Nicki’s luggage and swept the room with a practiced gaze before pointing at the couch.

“That had best be a pullout.”

“If it’s not, we’ll get a rollaway,” said Nicki.

I held my hands over my ears. “No. No. No, no, no, no . . .”

“Rock, paper, scissors,” said my sister.

“Forget it,” said Jon. “You cheat.”

“Mom!”
I screamed.

My mother was at the window with her back to us and her hands in her pockets. “Yes, dear?” she asked mildly.

“Get them a room!”

“Well, Josie, I would if I could, but the hotel’s sold out.”

“Well . . . well, then they can sleep with you.”

“Ew,” said Nicki, at the exact same time as Jon said, “Negative.”

My mother’s serene smile widened. “They can’t share our room. Leon’s coming down tonight.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, edging back to the foyer, where I could fart in peace. Or so I thought.

“I heard that!” Nicki cackled.

“I’m not staying with Mother and her boy toy,” Jon said.

“He’s an old soul,” said Nicki.

“Says who?” asked Jon.

“Says Leon,” said Nicki. “He told me all about it over seitan crumble tacos Friday night.”

“Could you guys please . . .” I began.

“
All
about it,” Nicki repeated, with a Cheshire-cat grin on her face. My mother began to look faintly perturbed.

The couch in the living room was a spindly-legged affair with a striped white satin cover and a pair of fussy tassled pillows. Jon stacked the pillows on the floor and poked around in the cooler. “Rations,” he said approvingly, and inserted an entire hard-boiled egg into his mouth.

“I don’t believe this,” I muttered. I locked the bathroom door behind me, fumbled through my purse, pulled out my cell phone, and speed-dialed David. But even as I was pouring out my tale of woe and desperately searching for a match, I knew with unalterable certainty that I would be spending my last night as a single woman in the company of my brother and sister.

•   •   •

Three hours later, my mother-in-law-to-be, swathed in mocha silk, far skinnier and miles more elegant than a lifetime’s worth of cabbage soup could make me, tapped her champagne glass and beamed a little tipsily at the hundred guests assembled in the plush candlelit back room of her favorite French restaurant, where murals of springtime by the Seine decorated the walls and the appetizers started at twenty dollars. “I want to thank everyone for coming to David and Josie’s rehearsal dinner,”
she said. I sipped from my own glass. Lillian’s waist was as tiny as a child’s, and the skin on her cheeks was stretched taut and shiny. I wondered, once again, just how much work she’d had done. “And I want to say how delighted I am to welcome Josie and her family . . .” She paused and worked up a smile for my mother (holding hands with a bearded, beaming, ponytailed Leon on my left side) and my siblings (whispering in front of the open bar, right by the kitchen door, the better to intercept the passed hors d’oeuvres as they came out) “. . . into ours. We are so happy to see David so happy!”

David smiled at Lillian and bent his head to whisper in my ear. Instead of
I love you,
I heard,
We should keep your sister away from the champagne.
I nodded my heartfelt agreement, squeezed his hand, and farted—quietly, I hoped—into my cushioned seat. David’s mother smiled graciously into the overheated, dimly lit room that smelled of a dozen competing perfumes and the lilies that made up the centerpieces. “Would anyone from Josie’s family care to say a few words?”

My mother and Leon were still huddled together, eyes locked, oblivious. Leon, I noticed, had fastened his ponytail with a bright green terry-cloth scrunchie that matched my mother’s jacket. Sweet. I lifted my eyebrows, but neither of them noticed. Jon, never much for public speaking, finally ducked his head and mumbled, “Congratulations, you guys.”

“Where’s her father?” I heard David’s great-uncle Lew whisper loudly. He was quickly shushed by cousin Daphne, who hauled him out to the lobby where, I was certain, she’d deliver into his tufted ear the thirty-second rundown on my less-than-conventional family (father bailed nine years ago, mother recently hooked up with a much younger man, brother on an ROTC scholarship, sister some kind of scandal although she certainly is a looker). I swallowed hard, feeling acid etch
a burning trail up my esophagus. No more cabbage soup, I decided. In fact, no more anything until the vows were exchanged.

David squeezed my hand as his mother shuffled her feet, then sat down. I gave him a small shrug and a grateful smile. We’d announced our wedding in the
Times
. The item was supposed to run the following morning.
David Henry Epstein and Josephine Anne Krystal are to be married this evening, at the Ritten-house Hotel in Philadelphia.
David had sent in our information at his parents’ request. “You know my dad. All publicity is good publicity. Are you okay with it?” I told him, “Sure.” I’d worked hard for my degree. I might as well have the pleasure of seeing in print the words
summa cum laude
and the names of the Ivy League institutions I’d be paying for decades to come.

But there was more to it than that. Secretly, I thought of that announcement, with the black-and-white photograph of David and me, posing with our eyebrows exactly level, per the
Times
’s request, the few lines of biography (“the bride and groom met in Philadelphia, where the bridegroom was pursuing a business degree at the Wharton School and the bride works as a stringer for the Associated Press”), as a flag. Sometimes it was a red flag, the one a matador snaps in front of a bull; sometimes a white flag, run up from a sinking ship, signaling surrender; but mostly it was the kind of flag you’d wave if you got lost in the woods and were hoping for a passing plane to spot you.
Here I am. Here I am.

My father read
The New York Times
. Or at least when he lived with us, he used to. He’d walk to the end of our driveway early on Sunday mornings, magisterially clad in his black terry-cloth bathrobe, with Milo the bulldog trotting ponderously in his wake, and carry the newspaper into the living room, closing the door behind him so that he could absorb the news of the day
without distraction. I don’t know if his scrutiny of the paper extended to the wedding announcements, but ever since my engagement I’d had a fantasy of him showing up on my wedding day to tell me what a lovely and obviously accomplished young woman I’d turned into; how sorry he was to have missed the last eight years of my life; how lucky David was to have me. Sometimes, in my daydream, he would get choked up as he told me that he knew he didn’t deserve it, but could he have the honor of walking me down the aisle? In the daydream, I never cried. Sometimes, I even told him no.

As the tuxedo-clad waiters whisked away my untouched plate of sautéed skate with hazelnut beurre blanc, asparagus, and pommes Anna and replaced it with a glass flute filled with cassis sorbet, David gave me a kiss. Then he sniffed, frowning. “Was that you?”

I shifted in my seat as Nicki breezed over from the bar to stand at the head of the table with her glass in her hand. “I’d like to say a few words, if I might.”

“Ah,” said Lillian. “The sister of the bride!”

“Fuck,” I whispered, at the same moment David whispered, “Oh, no.” Too late. Nicki clambered on top of her undoubtedly expensive upholstered chair to beam down at the assembled guests, most of them David’s out-of-town relatives and his father’s important clients. She wore a tight suede skirt and a clingy chocolate-brown sweater. Her hair, shiny and brown, swung around her shoulders; her high-heeled tight-fitting leather boots stretched to her knees and added three inches to her height.

“Hi, I’m Nicki Krystal. Some of you may recognize me from QVC,” was how she began. David’s mother blinked. I swallowed a mouthful of icy sorbet and pasted a smile on my face. After spending years lurching from one college, one city, one
job, and one boyfriend to another, my little sister, now twenty-five, had finally gotten her act at least semi-together and landed a job modeling Diamonique jewelry on cable TV. She was by far the most famous member of our family. At least from the wrists down.

“I shared a room with Josie for seventeen years. I know her better than anyone in the world. And there are some things about my sister that I’d like to share with her new family.”

I sank down in my seat, smoothing my pleated black-and-white-pique skirt over my knees and thinking that the less my new family heard from Nicki, the better it would be for all of us.

“First,” said Nicki, thrusting her index finger dramatically in the air, “she’s not normally this thin.”

David’s father let loose with a big, hearty
ho-ho-ho
. Lillian craned her neck around to stare at me in surgically perfected profile. I gave her a nervous grin, feeling myself start to sweat through the armpits of my black silk top.

“Now, I don’t know how she did it!” Nicki said. “But seriously, David, if there’s a buffet anywhere on your honeymoon, my advice is don’t let her near it, because I don’t know how many calories the human body can handle in one sitting.”

I pretended to wipe my lips and groaned quietly into my napkin.

“Number two!” said Nicki. “She generally likes books better than people. I mean, I take it she likes you all right . . .” She favored David with a smile, which he weakly returned. “But as for the rest of humanity, forget it. If you ever have a party—and you probably won’t, because my sister, as you’ve probably figured out, is not big on socializing—but if you ever do, she’ll probably disappear about fifteen minutes into it and you’ll find her in the bedroom with a book.”

More nervous chuckles from the crowd. I shot my mother a beseeching look, which she either didn’t see or decided to ignore.

“But,” said Nicki. She lifted her chin, raised herself onto her tiptoes, and held herself perfectly still, in a pose demanding silence. The audience complied. “My sister Josie . . .” She bent her head, and when she looked up again, her eyes were glistening. “My sister Josie is loyal. She would do anything in the world to help the people she loves, even if it’s at her own expense. She . . .” Nicki took a quick breath and looked at the crowd, then at me. “She’s the best person I know and she deserves to be happy.” She leveled her gaze at my not-quite-husband. “Take care of her,” she said, and eased herself off the chair and strutted back to the bar.

•   •   •

“So I can stay now?” Nicki asked sweetly, trailing me into the ladies’ room with a bottle of champagne that she’d liberated from the bar in her hand. “C’ mon, it’ll be fun! We’ll order room service and tell ghost stories!”

A little girl in pink exited one of the stalls with her mother behind her. “I wear big girl underpants now!” she proclaimed. She looked up at my sister. “Do you wear big girl underpants?”

Nicki stared down at her. “No, I generally go commando.”

The mother’s eyes widened. “Jesus, Nicki,” I said, and dragged her into the handicapped stall. (“What’s commando?” I heard the girl asking as the door swung shut.)