The Guy Not Taken

by Jennifer Weiner

  “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?”

  She was funny and smart, ambitious and pretty, and desperately insecure—but in his limited experience, that was true of most women. He loved her. At least he was pretty sure that he did. But things weren’t perfect. For one thing, they lived two hours apart, and saw each other only on weekends. Bruce liked sleeping in and smoking pot, and tended to leave things in his apartment about where they’d landed when he kicked them off or put them down. Clothes stayed on the floor until he ran out, and finally gathered everything into a laundry basket, which he drove home for his mother to wash. Dishes stayed in the sink until they drew flies. Food stayed in the refrigerator until it rotted or liquefied. At Cannie’s apartment, everything was neat, and everything had a place, which meant that he was forever misplacing something, or knocking something over, breaking a glass candleholder or her favorite serving plate.

  She’d accused him, more than
once, of drifting through life, content to be a graduate student until he died, secure in the knowledge that his parents would continue to fund his education. He worried that she didn’t know how to relax, that she saw life as one endless marathon and herself as a failure if she didn’t finish first.

  He worried about how sad she was sometimes. Depression ran in her family. She’d warned him of that the first time they slept together. “You should be careful,” she whispered. “My whole family’s insane. Clinically insane.” He told her that he wasn’t afraid. “My sister’s on Prozac,” she said, pressing her lips against his neck. “My grandmother died in an institution.” He kissed her again, and she made a noise like a little bird, and he thought as he held her that this could be serious, that this was a girl he could love for the rest of his life.

  And why not? They were both the right age, the right religion. She had a good job; he had (on paper, at least) a bright future. But when she’d looked up at him, curled on the couch with her eyes wide, tracing the tip of one finger around the edge of her wineglass, asking, “Bruce, where are we going with this?” he’d opened his mouth and found that he had no idea what to say.

  “Fine,” she’d said. “You’re not sure. It’s no big deal. I can wait.” When she lifted her gaze to meet his, he’d been worried that she’d be crying, but she wasn’t. She didn’t seem sad. Just determined. “I can wait,” she’d said, “but I can’t wait forever.”

  “So?” asked Neil, his pale, sharp-featured face inquisitive. “Are you and Cannie next in line?”

  “Maybe,” Bruce said.

  “Maybe?” asked Tom, raising his eyebrows and clenching his big fists on the table.

  “Yeah, what’s with maybe?” asked Neil.

  Bruce said the first thing he could think of. “I can’t stand her dog,” he blurted. This, at least, was unambiguously true. Cannie had a tiny little yappy dog, a terrier mix she’d gotten secondhand. The dog had brown-and-white spots, and a sneer from when his mother had bitten him (showing more sense, Bruce privately thought, than little Nifkin had demonstrated in the three years he’d known the cur). He’d come with his name, a disappointment to his mistress, who’d told Bruce she’d always planned on calling a dog Armageddon, after the Morrissey song. “The chorus goes, ‘Armageddon, come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come,’ “ she’d said. “I always knew that if I had a dog I’d want to call him that, so I could stand in the park and yell, ‘Come, Armageddon!’ “ Bruce hated Morrissey, hated cutesy pet names, and thought that any dog under twenty pounds was more of a decorative cushion than anything else, but he’d been careful not to share any of that with Cannie.

  “Nifkin?” asked Chris. “What’s wrong with Nifkin?”

  “Ah, you know,” said Bruce. “He’s got that yappy little bark, and he sheds, and he hates me.”

  “How come?” asked Neil.

  “’Cause he gets to sleep with Cannie when I’m not around, but he has to sleep on his dog bed when I am. And when I’m at her place and she’s not there, he just glares at me. It’s scary.” There was more. Cannie was always petting the dog, holding him on her lap and talking to him in a tender lisping baby talk that Bruce could barely decipher. She knew he hated Nifkin, which didn’t improve the situation. Once, in a teasing mood, she said that if a genie came out of a bottle, Bruce would wish for her dog to be turned into a sack of weed. And Bruce, in a teasing mood, said, “You bet I would.” Cannie still held his remark against him. She would bring it up in fights. “You look at my dog and I see murder in your heart!” she’d say, cradling the trembling terrier against her body, her tone sort of teasing, but sort of serious . . . the same voice she used when she was musing out loud about what they’d name their children.

  Tom set his mug down on the table with a slam, flexed his bare arms, and stared at Bruce with bloodshot brown eyes. “The dog,” he said, “must be eliminated.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bruce,” he said, “I’m doing this for your future. I’m doing it for the future of the species. No dog, no problem. The dog has got to go.”

  • • •

  So there they were, the remaining good men, crammed into Neil’s tidy silver Camry, which had been freshly detailed for the wedding, blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One,” doing seventy miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike on their way to Philadelphia for the liberation of Nifkin. Bruce sat shotgun and sipped from the bottle of tequila—not enough to incapacitate him completely, but enough to convince him that this was a good idea. Tom and Chris were in the backseat, and Steve was draped over both of their laps, head tilted sideways—“So if he pukes,” Chris explained, “he won’t choke on vomit.”

  “Hey,” Neil said anxiously, “try to get his head out the window if he starts. I’ve got to take this car to the airport after the wedding.”

  “Lotta rock stars choke on vomit,” said Chris, and then he fell asleep with his head against the window, mouth slightly open, chin resting on his pressed white shirt.

  With the spring air rushing through the open windows and the miles slipping by, Bruce felt alive, almost electric, with purpose. They couldn’t change the world that night, they couldn’t rescue Tom’s little sister, Missy, they couldn’t solve the riddle of how to know when you were ready for marriage, but the problem of a ten-pound terrier with a bad attitude and a stupid name, this they could solve.

  Their plan was for Bruce to sneak into Cannie’s apartment and lure Nifkin into the living room with the remains of Steve’s omelette. Once he’d gotten the dog out the front door, Tom and Chris would scoop him up in Neil’s jacket and smuggle him into the car. Then they could drive him to Valley Forge, where Washington’s troops had wintered, and set him free.

  “He’ll be out in the wild,” Tom said. “Where he belongs.”

  Bruce thought there had probably never been a dog that belonged in the wild less than Nifkin, who dined on hamburgers and scrambled eggs and slept on an embroidered monogrammed pillow, but he kept quiet, and took another burning gulp of tequila. He’d almost gotten himself to the point where he believed the plan could work. He could picture the scene: the dog eliminated, Cannie distraught and desperate for comfort, as opposed to answers about how Nifkin had managed to unlock the apartment door and make his way outside.

  “It’ll be great,” said Chris, who’d woken up at the exit 4 tollbooth just before the Ben Franklin Bridge.

  “It’ll be beautiful,” said Tom, pulling the hood of Neil’s too-small sweatshirt over his head and giving the ties a yank so that all Bruce could see was the tip of his nose and the Rasputin-ish glint in his eyes.

  “But what if he comes back?” Neil asked, without taking his eyes off the road. “Like Lassie. Don’t you hear about that sometimes? Those dogs who go across the whole country to find the house they used to live in?”

  There was silence. Bruce thought about Nifkin. He wore a heart-shaped identification pendant on his rhinestone-trimmed collar, and on snowy days Cannie had been known to dress him in miniature Gore-Tex boots. He didn’t think Nifkin was the sort of dog to cross the country in search of his mistress. He thought Nifkin was the sort of dog who wouldn’t cross a snowy street without his boots on.

  “Don’t worry,” Tom said finally. “He won’t want to come back. He’ll probably be happier out there . . . with the squirrels and all.” He stared out the window dreamily. “Dogs love squirrels.”

  Neil killed the headlights as they pulled onto Cannie’s street, and killed the engine as they approached her apartment building, so that the car glided over the pavement like a shark in black water.

  “Go, men,” Neil whispered, reaching across the gear shaft to grasp Bruce’s shoulders in a half-hug. “And remember, you’re doing this for love.”

  Bruce slipped his key into the door, padded softly up three flights of stairs, unlocked another door, and crept through the living room and down the hall of Cannie’s apartment. He eased open her bedroom door. There was a pale pink dress hanging from t
he closet door, her dress for Neil’s wedding. She was sleeping on her side, hair spilling over the pillow, her body a vague lump underneath her down comforter. Curled on the pillow beside her was Nifkin.

  “Nifkin?” he whispered. He pursed his lips and whistled softly. The dog’s ears twitched, but he didn’t move. Bruce slipped his hands under the dog’s warm, pliant body and lifted him into the air. Nifkin opened his eyes, yawned, and stared at Bruce. “Good boy,” said Bruce. Nifkin yawned again, looking bored.

  Cannie muttered something in her sleep and rolled over into the empty space the dog had left behind. Bruce stood beside her bed with Nifkin dangling from his hand, staring at him, unblinking. He thought about his parents, holding hands on the beach. He thought about Tom’s father, standing on the deck with a cigarette while his daughter cried. He could do better than that.

  “Marry me,” he whispered. The words hung in the air. The dog stared at him. Cannie rolled over again, sighing into the pillow while she dreamed.

  He set the dog down gently on top of his monogrammed pillow, pulled the covers over Cannie’s shoulders, and bent down and kissed her cheek. “I love you,” he whispered. His breath ruffled her hair. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, feeling the weight of the miles he’d traveled, everything he’d drunk and smoked that night, everything he’d heard, and he was more tired than he’d ever been in his entire life. But he didn’t lie down. He didn’t move. He stood there in the dark, with his eyes closed, waiting for his answer.

  BUYER’S MARKET

  “I don’t want to start off by saying that it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Namita said, adjusting herself on her bar stool and smoothing her tight wool pants. A guy at the pool table gave her an appreciative grin. Namita nodded back coolly, then returned her attention to Jess. “But it is. Seriously, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m not sure I’m going to actually sell it,” Jess shouted, in the vain hope of being heard over the thundering din of the jukebox and the chatter of the hundred or so people crowded around the bar. Every woman she saw appeared to be six feet tall and blond, which normally would have made Jess—at five-foot-two with brown curls—feel even shorter and mousier than usual, but that night she felt as giddy as if she’d drunk champagne, as if her heart was full of helium, as if she could float. “Probably I won’t.” She took a gulp of the Pabst Blue Ribbon Namita had ordered. “Ugh. This is warm.”