The Guy Not Taken (9 page)

“What?” Nicki asked. “What? Underwear gives me panty lines! Do you want me to lie to little children?” She turned her back, tapping her foot and exhaling impatiently while I took care of business.

Jon was standing at parade rest in front of the elevators, his feet planted hip-width apart and his arms behind his back.
When the doors slid open, the three of us piled in, along with a tiny white-haired lady in a pale blue pleated dress—a great-aunt or second cousin from the groom’s side, I thought.

“So anyhow,” said Nicki, as if the entire rehearsal dinner had merely been a five-minute interruption to her conversation, “the QVC thing’s great. Did I tell you they’re thinking of letting me do shoes, too?”

I nodded.

“But I think I need to be in Los Angeles.”

“Oh, Los Angeles is wonderful,” offered the aged party. “And if you really want to be an actress, it is where you need to be.”

Jon grimaced. I held my breath. Nicki’s eyebrows drew down as she turned slowly to stare down the little old lady. “Excuse me, but I was speaking to my brother and my sister,” she said. “I don’t believe you were invited into this conversation.”

“Nicki,” I said, and put my hand on her shoulder. She twitched it off.

The woman’s chin and pearls and pleats trembled softly. “Well, I didn’t mean . . .”

The elevator lurched to a stop at the third floor. The bridal suite was on twenty-one, and the woman had punched twenty-three. Evidence, as if I needed any more, that there was no God.

Meanwhile, Nicki had launched into a full-blown soliloquy. “Why is it,” she asked the mirrored ceiling, “that people think that just because they overhear something they’re invited to comment?”

The poor woman in blue was cringing in a corner of the elevator.

“Maybe it’s Oprah,” said Jon, trying hard to change the subject.

“No, it’s me,” Nicki spat. “Everyone thinks they’ve got
something to say. Everyone thinks they can just throw their two cents in. Tell me how to live my life, tell me what I’m screwing up, tell me what I should be doing better. You, Mom, everyone!”

“I’m very sorry if I offended you somehow,” the woman said.

Nicki opened her mouth to snarl something in response as the doors slid open on the fifth floor and an aged couple—the man in a tuxedo, the woman in a beaded silver gown—shuffled in. I grabbed my sister’s left elbow, Jon took her right, and I smiled at the little old lady as we pulled her into the hall. “We’ll take the stairs,” I said.

•   •   •

Up in the suite, the maids had piled blankets and pillows on the pullout bed. “Secure the perimeter!” Jon barked, and made a tour of the two rooms, peering out the windows at the buildings across the park as if there might be snipers targeting the room. I stood on my tiptoes to rub my palm against his buzz cut. “Ladies love the hair,” he announced, and snapped a blanket over his bed. “Is there an open bar at this thing?”

“But of course,” I said. David’s family had spared no expense.

Jon gave a triumphant grin. “I shall have my choice of bridesmaids.”

“I’m the only bridesmaid,” Nicki called from the wedding bed.

Jon looked at her and stopped smiling. “Unfortunate,” he said, and closed the curtained French doors between the living room and the bedroom.

In the bedroom, Nicki wriggled out of her skirt, shucked her sweater, pulled on a tank top and pink flannel pajama bottoms, and flopped happily onto the bed with her champagne and the telephone. “Hello, room service?” she said. I picked her clothes up off the floor and hung them neatly in the closet.
“Two cheeseburgers, an order of french fries, a hot fudge sundae, only please don’t put the hot fudge on the sundae, um, one Heineken . . .” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Josie, what do you want?”

“Ice water.”

“One chocolate malted and two Heinekens,” said Nicki, hanging up. She grabbed the television remote off the bedside table. I pulled off my own clothes and slipped on a hotel robe, feeling anxious and antsy and strangely sad. There was nothing left for me to do. My dress had been steamed and hung on the back of the closet door, my hose and shoes and various constricting undergarments laid out carefully on a bench beside it. My pores had been squeezed, my bikini line waxed. My apartment was cleaned and locked up, and my cat boarded for the next ten days. I wouldn’t have much to do but show up on time, strap myself into the big white dress, say “I do” at the appropriate moment, and remember the steps to the dance David and I had rehearsed.

“We need to talk,” said Nicki. She grabbed my hands and tugged me to the bed. “Now, Josie,” she said. “I don’t want to frighten you, but there’s something you should know before tomorrow.”

I wriggled away to pull my suitcase out of the closet, heaving it onto the bed and starting an inventory. Swimsuit, SPF 45 for my body, SPF 30 for my face, sun hat, sandals . . . “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“David has a snake.”

“Huh?”

“A snake,” she repeated. “And the snake wants to hide in your cave.”

“Oh, Lord,” I muttered, carrying my cosmetic case into the bathroom. Toothpaste, toothbrush, mouthwash, dental floss . . .

“Don’t be afraid!” Nicki yelled. “The snake means you no harm!” She lifted the champagne bottle and took a healthy swallow. “You must welcome the snake in order to be a good wife.”

“I’ll do that,” I told her. I grabbed my razor out of the shower. When I turned around again Nicki was standing right behind me, smiling at me in the mirror.

“The snake will go in and out of the cave, and in and out and in and out and in and out . . .” She waved the bottle back and forth to suit the words.

“Okay,” I said, and held out my hands for the champagne. Nicki ignored me.

“And then!” she said, starting to giggle. “It’s going to spit up!”

I picked up the telephone. Room service greeted me with “Hello, Mrs. Epstein!” It took me a minute to realize that Mrs. Epstein was meant to be me. “Hi, can we add a pot of coffee to our order?”

Room service said no problem. Nicki giggled some more and hoisted herself onto the bed.

“I’m only telling you things you need to know,” she said.

“Believe me, I’m grateful.” I zipped up the suitcase and laid down beside my sister, who’d flopped on her belly to channel surf.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“Nah,” I lied. “Piece of cake.”

The food arrived. Nicki draped a towel over the bed, then set out each of the plates, lifting the silver lids with a flourish. “A prenuptial picnic!”

I told her I wasn’t hungry. She waved her cheeseburger under my nose, fingers sinking into the soft seeded bun. “Just one bite,” she wheedled, the way my mother used to coax her to eat
when she was little. I shrugged, tried to take the tiniest bite I could manage, and groaned out loud as my teeth cracked the charred crust of the burger and the rich juices spilled into my mouth.

“Oh, dear Lord,” I breathed, and gobbled a fistful of crisp french fries dipped in herbed mayonnaise. “If I don’t fit into that dress tomorrow . . .”

“You’ll fit,” my sister promised. I drank a third of a beer in one gulp, then burped, wiped my lips, and licked salt and melted cheese off my fingertips. Five minutes later, I’d demolished the burger and was slowly spooning fudge over the dish of vanilla ice cream, promising myself that I’d skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

“How’s work?” Nicki asked.

“Okay,” I said through a mouthful of ice cream. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at the Associated Press offices, which meant I worked nights and weekends, running off to fires or car crashes or pier collapses, usually in bad neighborhoods where the witnesses were happy to give colorful, profanity-laced quotes about whatever they’d just seen, but clammed up when you asked for their names. “Call me Little Ray,” a guy who’d been the single survivor of a six-car crash on Roosevelt Boulevard said the week before.

I’d patiently explained that the AP required both a first and a last name—preferably the ones he’d been born with. (“But everybody calls me Little Ray!” he’d insisted.)

I liked the work, though, and I liked writing, but two weeks into my tenure I’d done the math and realized that if I’d been making five hundred dollars less a year, I would have qualified for food stamps. It was a problem, given the student-loan situation. I dreamed of making more money, but so far the only thing I’d been able to think of doing was dropping out of journalism
and going into advertising, where you could do quite well, if you didn’t mind using your talent and creativity to sell tampons (for some reason, I was convinced that, no matter what city I worked in or which agency hired me, I would end up with the word
absorbent
figuring prominently in my future).

Of course I’d soon be a married woman, and David was set to start working as a venture capital consultant, which would be considerably more lucrative than my career as a cub reporter. Maybe I’d get promoted. Maybe David would make a killing. Maybe I could get my loans paid off on time. Early, even. Say, when I turned fifty.

Nicki watched girls in hot pants gyrating to rap songs where every third word was bleeped out while I polished off the ice cream. Then she reached over me for the phone. “Hello, room service? We’re going to need another burger,” she said in the same tone that the ship’s captain in
Jaws,
upon glimpsing the great white shark, had said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

“No more,” I protested, sucking the last traces of chocolate off the spoon. “Seriously. I might explode.”

“Fine,” said Nicki. “I’ll eat it myself.”

In the bathroom, I took a twenty-minute shower in a stall that had half a dozen jets protruding from the tiled walls. I scrubbed myself with lemon-scented soap and washed my hair with rosemary mint shampoo. At the sink, swathed in a hotel bathrobe, I brushed and flossed, rinsed and spat, patted astringent and moisturizer onto my face, and considered my reflection. Things were as good as they were going to get. My eyebrows weren’t lopsided, my complexion was clear, my teeth and hair were shiny. If I were a horse, I’d do just fine on the auction block.

I pulled on my ugliest, oldest, most comfortable flannel
nightshirt, tiptoed through the darkened bedroom, made sure the comforter was free of food and dishes, and slipped into bed next to my sister.

She rolled over instantly and tried to spoon me.

“Get off!” I whispered, wriggling away.

“Oh, Josie,” she giggled, her skinny arms around my neck, “your nightshirt is driving me wild!”

“Stay on your side of the bed or you’ll be sleeping in the closet,” I said.

Nicki was quiet for all of thirty seconds. “Do you think Leon was a virgin before he met Mom?” she asked.

“Nicki,” I said, “that is really not what I need to be thinking about right now.”

My sister was undeterred. “I mean, he was her student.”

“Student teacher,” I said. It was a distinction I’d made many times in the two years since our fifty-six-year-old mother had taken up with a twenty-four-year-old.

“So young,” said Nicki. “Too young.”

“Not another word,” I told her.

“Fine,” she grumbled, rolling on her side and falling almost instantly asleep.

I shifted around in the big, high bed. It was 11:03 at night. T minus sixteen hours until my date with the white, tight, fitted satin, ridiculously expensive dress that hung over the back of the closet door like a ghost.

By 11:36 I had heartburn. By 11:38 I had doubts. By midnight I’d convinced myself that marriage in general, and David in particular, were bad ideas, and that the true love of my life was really Craig Patterson. I’d gone to high school with Craig, but we’d never actually spoken until our fifth reunion, when he’d followed me into the coatroom and slurred that I had the prettiest tits of all the girls in our class. Then he’d shoved his
phone number in my pocket and lurched off toward the ballroom where, I heard later, he’d gotten sick in a potted plant.

At 12:15 I crept out of bed and stared at the empty streets around Rittenhouse Square, watching the lone traffic light tint the pavement green and yellow and red and green again. The treetops bent in the wind, and rain spattered against the windows. Was rain on a wedding day good luck? Bad luck? Nothing special? I couldn’t remember.

At 12:30 I picked up the telephone. Craig’s number was still in my wallet, on the napkin where he’d written it. I held my breath as I dialed his number. The telephone rang twice, then a woman picked it up. “Hello?”

My tongue turned to lead. “Hello-ooo?” the woman called. “Anybody there?”

“Sorry, wrong number,” I blurted. I hung up the phone and took a few minutes to get my heart rate under control. Then I got back into bed and lay there, staring at the elaborate swags of the canopy, thinking about happy endings. Did I know anyone who’d had one? Not my parents, although these days my mother did seem pretty blissed out with young Leon. Not David’s, either, I suspected. His father’s eyes lingered on any woman older than fourteen and younger than forty, and his mother started sipping Sancerre at around four o’clock every afternoon and continued drinking right up until dinner, when she’d switch to vodka, toy with her food, and surreptitiously tug the flesh under her chin or pinch the skin of her upper arms, as if she was already planning her next plastic surgery.

But even so. I’d been at David’s parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary party, where they’d danced to “Fly Me to the Moon.” His father had dipped his mother backward on her high heels, whispering into her ear, and she’d thrown her head back, laughing, and I’d thought, maybe a little sentimentally, that that was
what love looked like. Even my parents, before my father had left and my mother had spent years in a chlorine-scented fog before emerging on Leon’s arm, once had their moments. I remembered my father coming home from work, immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, setting his combination-lock briefcase down by the door and holding his arms open. “Wife!” he would call, and my mother would drop whatever she’d been doing and find him. They would stand there in the hallway next to the washer and the dryer, sometimes for just an instant, sometimes for much longer, holding on to each other at the end of the day.