The Guy Not Taken (14 page)

I took the telephone, assuming that it was Gary, wanting to debrief in real time. “Ruthie?”

His voice, as always, went straight to my heart and my knees, making the first one pound and the second two quiver. I sank onto Grandma’s fringed apricot velvet fainting couch, displacing two doilies on my way down. “Rob,” I said faintly. “How are you?”

“Good,” he said. Then, “Busy.”

“I bet.” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to sound snide or sympathetic. My voice cracked on the last word.
Pull yourself together,
I told myself sternly, picking doilies up off the floor.

“With a new show, actually,” he said.

“Oh?” My tone was polite. I’d quit reading
Variety
in the wake of our whatever-it-was, and I’d assumed that Rob was still working on
The Girls’ Room,
which should just be gearing up for its next season.

I leaned my cheek against the soft nap of the couch as he went into his pitch: a family dramedy he was preparing for pilot season. Hot mom, recovering alcoholic dad, dysfunctional sisters who managed a Miami lingerie boutique.

“Are you interested?”

“Do you mean, would I watch it?”

He chuckled. “No. I know you’re not that much of masochist. Would you write it? We could use you, Ruth. We could use your voice.”

“You can’t have it,” I blurted.

Rob’s laughter was warm and indulgent, the sound of a father’s amusement at a cute but willful child. “Well, not for keeps. But you’re not working . . .” He let his voice trail off, turning it into a question. When I didn’t reply, he pressed on. “Look, you can’t just sit around all day. There’s only so many laps you can swim.” His voice softened. I pictured him in one of his ratty see-through T-shirts, five days’ worth of stubble, his glasses, and his rare, delicious grin. “And I miss working with you. We were good together.”

“We were nothing,” I said. My grandmother was staring at me from the kitchen with a cordial glass of crème de menthe in her hand, eyebrows raised.

“Ruth . . . look. I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry if it gave you the wrong idea.”

“Sure thing. Well, okay then! Thanks for calling!” I kept my voice upbeat. Maybe Grandma would think my gentleman caller was a telemarketer.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” he said.

“No,” I said, and then, because I was nothing if not polite, I said, “No thank you.”

“Big surprise, Ruth,” he said. Then he was gone.

•   •   •

I swam for hours that night, tracing the tiled lap lane back and forth until my arms were numb. When I got home, Lonely-guy had e-mailed. “Is it just me,” he’d asked, “or is every woman out there a freak?”

“I’m not,” I whispered at the screen. But I didn’t write it. I typed in “See you tomorrow,” shut off the laptop, and crawled into bed.

•   •   •

The next morning I drove back to the Beverly Center for a new swimsuit, thinking that maybe I’d stop by the pet shop and see if the skinny puppy was still there. I was walking down the bright, bustling corridor toward the escalators when I saw a familiar figure—long, denim-clad legs; skinny shoulders; a swing of shiny dark-brown hair. “Caitlyn?”

She turned around. “Oh, hi, Ruth.” She was wearing a big gray hoodie that enveloped her torso and had “Berkeley” written across the chest, and she was pushing a small, candy-apple-red wheelchair that carried the twisted frame of a little boy. The boy wore a Berkeley sweatshirt, too, and stiff blue jeans that looked like they’d never been washed, or worn, or walked in. His head rested against the wheelchair’s padded cradle; the mall’s lights glinted off his glasses. He made a hooting noise. Caitlyn looked down at him, then up at me.

“This is my brother, Charlie. Charlie, this is Ruth? She’s helping me with my essays?”

“Hi.” I bent down so I was at eye level with Charlie. I looked up at Caitlyn, who nodded, then extended my hand and touched it to his. His fingers were folded tightly against his palms, and his skin was so pale I could see the veins underneath it. “Nice to meet you.”

He gave another hoot, his lips working, eyes focused on my face. Caitlyn reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and wiped his lips. “Do you want lunch now?” she asked. I wondered whether Charlie was the reason she always talked in questions, the way she left her sentences open-ended, blanks that would never get filled in. “We’re going to go to the food court?”

“Oh. Well, have fun.”

Charlie moaned again, more loudly, struggling hard to make himself understood. Caitlyn bent her shining head to his, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. Her brother’s eyes stayed locked on mine, and I thought I could see where he was pointing, where he was going.

When Caitlyn lifted her head her fair skin was flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I told her.

Charlie’s fist bounced on his chest.

“He has cerebral palsy,” she said.

I nodded, looked at Charlie, and touched my cheek. “It’s a scar from an accident. A long time ago.”

Caitlyn sighed, then straightened up. “Do you want to get some lunch with us?” The three of us walked to the food court and sat at a metal-legged plastic-topped table, surrounded by chattering teenagers, mothers and daughters, women in suits and hose and sneakers lingering on their lunch breaks. Caitlyn bought herself a Diet Coke, and, for Charlie, a paper cone of french fries. She dipped each one into ketchup and lifted it to his lips with the same absentminded love as the mothers feeding their toddlers at the neighboring tables.

“When I was three my parents were driving on the Mass Pike to Boston for Thanksgiving. They were both teachers, they’d gone to school in Boston, and they were going to have Thanksgiving with some friends. Their car hit a patch of ice and rolled over into a ditch. They died, and I went through the windshield, in my car seat. That’s what happened to my face.”

Charlie twisted his head toward his sister, his mouth working. “Do you remember it?” Caitlyn translated.

I shook my head. “I really don’t remember it much.”

Caitlyn wiped Charlie’s face with a napkin. “So who took care of you?”

“My grandmother. She was living down in Coral Gables, but she didn’t think that was a good place to raise a little girl, so she moved up to my parents’ house in Framingham, and we lived there.”

They seemed to think this over while Charlie chewed another french fry. He had the same brown eyes and rounded chin as his sister. There was a smear of pink glitter on his cheek, where, I thought, she’d kissed him.

I got up.

“Well, Caitlyn, I’ll see you on Saturday. Nice to meet you, Charlie. Have a good day.” It sounded so stupid, so trite. I wondered what Charlie’s life was like, trapped in a body he couldn’t control, able to understand what he was seeing and hearing, unable to communicate. I was halfway out of the food court when I turned around and went back to their table and tapped Caitlyn on the shoulder. “You should write about this,” I blurted. She looked up at me with her shiny brown eyes. Her tiny pink purse was hooked over one of the arms of Charlie’s wheelchair, which had NASCAR stickers on the sides. “I was wrong about you,” I said.

She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s okay,” she said.

•   •   •

I skipped my swim that night. After it got dark, I pulled on a sweater that had been my mother’s. It was frayed at the elbows and unraveling at the hem. In a few of the pictures I had, she was wearing this sweater, and I imagined that even after all this time it still held some trace of her—a strand of her walnut-colored hair, the lavender smell of her skin, invisible handprints where my father had touched her, pulling her close. I curled up in a corner of the couch and told my grandmother about Caitlyn and Charlie. Halfway through the story I started to cry. Grandma pulled a wad of tissue paper from her sleeve and handed it to me.

“What’s wrong, honey?” She was dressed in a white nightgown with mounds of lace at the neck and the wrists, and she looked like a baby bird peeking out of its nest.

“I don’t know.” I wiped my eyes. “People surprise me sometimes.”

She considered this. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “As long as people can still surprise you, it means you’re not dead.”

At midnight I was still awake, nerves jangling, muscles twitching, missing the water. I flipped open my laptop, clicked on “Documents,” double-clicked on the file called “The Little Family.” It was a screenplay I’d started years ago. I read through the first
ten pages
slowly. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared, either. It had potential. I hit “save” and then scrolled through my in-box, opening a missive from Lonelyguy that had arrived the day before. “Maybe we should have dinner.”

I hit “reply,” then scrolled up to find an e-mail from Caitlyn that had come that afternoon. “New Essay,” the subject line read.

“My eleven-year-old brother Charlie will never visit Paris,” she’d written. “He won’t play Little League baseball or run on the beach. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was
three months old.
Cerebral: of or pertaining to the brain. Palsy: a disorder of movement or posture.
My brother sees the world from his wheelchair. When I grow up, I will see things for him. I will go to all the places he can’t go, places where they don’t have curb cuts or wheelchair ramps, to flea markets and mountaintops, all the places in the world.”

I buried my face in my hands. How did Caitlyn get so brave? Why was I so afraid? I opened my eyes and closed the window containing Caitlyn’s essay, leaving up my unwritten reply to Lonelyguy’s letter and remembering what I’d told her the first time we’d met.
We’re still early in the process. It’s not too late to change your mind.

G
OOD
M
EN

A
t just past three o’clock in the morning, Bruce Guberman and the rest of the liquored-up bachelors piled into a booth at World of Bagels and hatched the plan to kidnap Bruce’s girlfriend’s rat terrier, Nifkin.

There had been twelve of them when the bachelor party had started, in the rented back room of a bar in Brooklyn. First they shot pool, then they’d played poker with laundry quarters and subway tokens. Poker had seemed like a good idea when Tom, the best man, broke out the cards, only he’d insisted that the winner of each hand do a shot, which meant that by the fifth hand there was a lot of inadvertent bluffing going on.

Things deteriorated after midnight when four of the groom’s fellow lab mates split a cab back to Manhattan and the room began to empty out. Clouds of smoke and the sour reek of beer hung over the bar’s scarred wooden tables and overflowing ashtrays. Tom presented Neil, the groom, with his wedding gift, which turned out to be a three-quarter ounce of marijuana wrapped, as Neil described it, in a festive matrimonial Baggie. Tom, with his face flushed and long strands of brown hair sticking to his sweaty cheeks, liked the sound of that so much he
repeated it over and over as the first bowl was packed and the pipe went around:
Festive Matrimonial Baggie!

Half an hour later the stripper arrived—dressed, for some reason, like Snow White, in a tight red top and a full blue skirt, with her lips painted into a crimson Cupid’s bow. Bruce blinked, trying to make sense of the costume. Did she have a day job at Six Flags or something like that? Her black hair was glossy under the bar’s smoke-ringed lights. It might have been a wig. Bruce was never sure of those things. Cannie, his girlfriend, would twirl around for him, grinning, asking, “What do you think?” He’d stare at her desperately. What had changed? Had she lost weight, or gotten her hair highlighted? Was she wearing a new coat or new shoes? Sometimes she’d take pity on him and tell him—“He cut three inches! That’s this much!” she’d say, holding her fingers apart for emphasis. He’d nod and smile and tell her it looked great, when the truth was that the only time he could really tell for sure was when she’d had her hair permed, and then only because of the smell.

The stripper set up a boom box that blared rap tunes with X-rated lyrics—
put your back into it, put your ass into it
. Within minutes she’d wriggled free of her costume and was gyrating against all five feet, four inches of the groom as if she were riding a mechanical merry-go-round—up, down, up, down, staring at him with a fixed, rigid smile, as Tom dumped a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor over the soon-to-be-bridegroom’s head.

“I’m the eighth dwarf!” Tom hollered, waving his hands in the air. “Horny!”

“There is no dwarf named Horny,” said Chris, sitting at the bar in perfectly pressed chinos and a crisp white shirt, looking as if he hadn’t drunk more than the rest of them put together. “There’s, let’s see . . . Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy . . . Doc . . . Sleepy . . .”

“Dopey!” Tom yelled, flicking his hair out of his eyes and
rolling his meaty shoulders as if readying for a fight. “There’s a dwarf named Dopey! How sweet is that?”

The stripper bent down, clamped Neil’s chin between her fingers, and gave him a long kiss, mashing her lips against his and turning her head this way and that, as if she were trying to shake water out of her ears. The pipe went around again, and Bruce inhaled deeply. “Bashful,” Chris said. Bruce handed him the pipe. Chris sucked in the smoke, held his breath, turned pink, and exhaled, coughing. Chris worked less and got high more often than anyone Bruce had ever met, but because he was blessed with the square jaw and fine features of a comicbook hero, and the dark-brown hair and bright-blue eyes of Superman himself, Chris got away with murder. “Happy . . . Doc . . .” Chris continued. The stripper disappeared into the bathroom, then returned in street clothes and demanded payment in a thick Long Island accent. Bruce, who’d somehow wound up the most sober of the bunch, hustled up twenty bucks apiece from the six remaining members of the bachelor party and handed it over. The stripper tucked the bills into her purse. “Good luck to your friend there,” she said, smiling at him, then turning to wink at Chris.

She had her keys in her hand, and Bruce noticed that her key chain held a scuffed plastic square with a baby’s picture inside. The little girl wore a frilly white dress and a sequined headband wrapped around her mostly hairless head. The stripper caught him staring and smiled with more animation than she’d shown to Neil during three songs and a simulated blow job.