The Guy Not Taken

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Things are going to happen. I can feel it,” Billy said, finishing his scone in three giant bites. “Stay by the phone tonight,” he said, leaning close to brush Jess’s cheek with his lips. She brushed crumbs off his collar, inhaling his fragrance—wet wool and soap again, with the addition of sweet bay rum cologne. Her father had worn that, too, a long time ago. “I’ll be in touch.”

  True to his word, when she got home from the movies Billy was sitting on the hallway floor, where she’d first seen him, but looking considerably less glum. He leapt to his feet when he saw her, and scooped her into his arms. “Rich girl, rich girl,” he chanted.

  “Put me down!” Jess squealed as he hoisted her in the air. Her skin tingled; her heart pounded so loud she was sure he’d be able to hear. He set her gently on her feet and, after she unlocked the door, he ushered her to the couch, dropped to his knees, took her hands, and whispered Toby’s price in her ear. She gasped and saw her beloved apartment blur around the edges.

  “There’s a hitch, though.”

  “What hitch?” she squeaked. His hands were still on hers, and she felt her body leaning toward his.

  “She wants to close next month. I know it’s last-minute, which is probably why she was willing to go so far above asking, but her stepson, or godson, or whatever, moved in with them, and she wants him out. I’ll help you find movers, and storage, and temporary housing. Whatever you need, Jess. But you should know, you’re not going to get a better deal than this.”

  Somehow, she managed to pull herself away from him and sit up straight. She looked around the room: the photographs of Moscow and Trieste and Milan, the cloisonné lamps with fringed peach-colored shades, the stacks of art books and novels, the heavy glass bowls full of nuts and candy that Aunt Cat always refilled for Jess’s visits. She’d lived here for eight years and she hadn’t ever gotten so much as a new set of sheets, let alone her own photographs, her own artwork or furniture. Time to move on, she thought. Time to move out. “So you think we should take it?”

  His eyes were intent and his voice was as serious as that of a man taking wedding vows when he answered, “I think we should.”

  • • •

  Jess wrangled three personal days from her unhappy boss at eBiz, and spent them packing up and supervising the movers, a trio of fire-hydrant-shaped fellows who spoke a language composed largely of grunts and seemed to take as their personal mission the task of folding, breaking, soiling, and mutilating every single thing she had inherited. Finally, early Friday morning, the last of Aunt Cat’s mahogany sideboards and marble end tables had been wrapped in padded blankets and wrestled onto the mirrored elevator, and the final cardboard box of books was loaded onto a grimy white truck (someone had written “Wash me, please!” in the dirt across the driver’s side door) and driven off to a storage facility in Newark. Jess took a quick shower, pulled on her best blue suit, wadded her wet towel and dirty clothes into a duffel bag, and stood in the middle of the empty living room, where the walls bore ghostly imprints of Aunt Cat’s paintings, and the floors had grooves where the couch and chairs used to be.

  She wandered over to the window. The summer before college she’d spent so many nights sitting there. She’d look down at the rustling trees of Riverside Park, at the Hudson River running beyond them, at the late-night joggers and the strolling couples, and think about the kind of life she’d make for herself. She hoped it would be something like Aunt Cat’s life, with stacks of books in every room, and dinner parties each month, with red wine and down comforters, surrounded by the things, and the people, she loved. But the truth was, red wine gave her headaches and she’d never been much for parties . . . and none of it mattered because now she and Billy would make a life together.

  The doorbell rang and Toby stormed into the kitchen, late, and, somehow, acting as if that was Jess’s fault. Billy followed her, squeezing Jess’s hand, as Toby attacked the apartment as if it were a man who’d wronged her, vigorously flushing toilets, wrenching taps open and shut, staring for long, ominous minutes at the light patch on the bedroom wall where Aunt Catherine’s carved wooden dresser had formerly resided.

  “You should have repainted,” she said, and narrowed her eyes.

  “I . . .” Jess stammered.

  “We’ll settle that at the table,” Billy said smoothly. Underneath his down coat he wore an elegant striped suit and a patterned silk tie of heavy burnt-orange silk. The blue wool cap that Jess had grown accustomed to was gone, replaced with a camel-colored muffler that looked suspiciously like cashmere.

  She reached for his hand as Toby yanked open the oven door, then kicked it shut with one Birkenstock-shod foot. Billy’s cell phone rang, and as he turned his back he held up one finger and said, “William Gurwich,” into the receiver. “At the table, okay?” he said into the telephone. He eased Jess into her coat, then out the door. Outside, there was a town car idling at the curb.

  “Wait,” she said. Billy sighed, and stopped with one hand on her back and one hand on the roof of the car. Jess stared at him, panicked, thinking, This is all wrong. Billy kissed her, then looked over her shoulder, up toward the Emerson, its facade glowing under the thin winter sun. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said.

  • • •

  Forty-five minutes later, Jess found herself in a boardroom with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park, sitting at a sleek teak conference table, signing her name again and again and again, handing over her driver’s license and a copy of Aunt Cat’s will, swearing and affirming that she, Jessica Hope Norton, a single woman, was the sole owner without any legal encumbrance of the property. Toby was there with her broker. Her stepson/godson/whatever was nowhere in sight. In addition to Billy, there were two lawyers, a notary, and a receptionist who’d asked if she could bring anything. “Coffee for everyone?” Billy asked, raising his eyebrows as he looked around the table. When she’d returned with the drinks, and a tray of pastries, he hadn’t even thanked her before selecting the biggest muffin from the pile.

  This can’t be happening, Jess thought as she stared down and saw her hand moving, seemingly of its own volition, signing her name. She tried to catch Billy’s eye, but he was talking to one of the lawyers. She wrote her name and pictured Toby’s lip curling as she stood in Jess’s bedroom, eyeballing the pictures by the side of her bed during one of her unannounced visits. “My mom was Miss Penn State,” Jess explained as the other woman scrutinized a shot of Gloria waving from the backseat of a convertible.

  Toby tilted the picture from side to side as if it were a glass of wine she was inspecting for sediment. “She’s not that goodlooking,” Toby finally said. “Actually,” she’d continued, making her way into the second bathroom, “I thought it was a picture of you.”

  Billy slid another stack of documents across the table, gave Jess a quick wink, and snickered at something on his BlackBerry. Jess wrote the date, her social security number. She accepted the check that he handed her in a heavy cream-colored envelope. All those zeroes, she thought, and tried to feel elated, and couldn’t.

  “Good luck,” Jess said faintly. Toby got to her feet, pocketed the keys, gave a grimace that could have been interpreted as a smile, flung her fringed wrap around her, and stomped out of the room. Jess sank back in her chair and spun so she could look out at the dirty gray sky, the snowbanks spangled with condensed exhaust fumes and broken glass, the bare, bedraggled trees.

  Billy smiled at her, a big, eat-the-world grin, not the sardonic half-smile she’d gotten used to, along with the down coat and the wool cap and the chapped fingers that could never find Mrs. Bastian’s key on the first try. “Thank you,” he said. It wasn’t “I love you,” Jess thought. But it wasn’t nothing. And maybe it was enough.

  Billy stood behind her chair and rocked it back and forth. “Take a look,” he crooned. “It’s all yours.” He sat down beside her, crossed his legs and adjusted the crease in his pants. “Just tell me where you want to start. Uptown? Downtown?”
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  “We can talk about it tonight,” Jess said. She turned away from the window and looked into his face. “Our place?”

  “Sure,” he said, and hugged her, holding her close as she buried her face in the warm hollow of his neck. “Eight okay?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  • • •

  That night she leaned against the brick wall of their restaurant, feeling the cold dampness seeping through her skirt. The wind blew sheets of newspaper and empty soda cans along the dirty sidewalk; a bus splattered sleet against the curb. At 8:15, Billy breezed down the block, wearing his new clothes and his old, familiar, heartbreaking smile. “So!” he said heartily, pulling off his gloves. “Have you been thinking about where we should start?”

  “Wherever,” she said eagerly. Too eagerly. Something flickered in his eyes, but it was too late for her to take it back, too late to stop. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  He squeezed her hands briefly. Then he pulled away. “Jess,” he began, taking a deep breath. “The thing is . . .”

  Another bus rumbled by. Jess knew what the thing was, and she couldn’t stand to hear him say it—not so close on the heels of the worst mistake she’d ever made in her life. She pulled away, trying for dignity, a measure of Aunt Cat’s cool reserve, as Billy babbled about how much she meant to him, how she was a great girl but he simply wasn’t in a place where he could consider anything long term, and besides, there was his writing to think about.

  The check from the sale of Aunt Cat’s apartment was still folded in her coat pocket, and she touched it, hoping for strength.

  “I need to go now,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded genuinely sorry, like the guy she remembered, the one she’d thought she’d cared for, the one who couldn’t sell Mrs. Bastian’s apartment even though his job depended on it, someone just as lost in the big city as she was herself.

  “It’s fine,” she lied. “I’ll be okay.”

  She swung her duffel bag over her shoulder. A cab screeched to a stop the second she raised her hand—a perfect New York moment, one of very few she’d ever had. Jess slammed the door shut before Billy could make it across the sidewalk.

  “Port Authority,” she told the driver. She leaned back against the ripped vinyl seat and buried her face in her hands.

  • • •

  She texted Namita to tell her that her plans had changed, and that instead of crashing with her, she’d be staying with Gloria for a while. She told her boss at eBiz that her father had died.

  “Sure, honey, you can stay as long as you want,” Gloria had said, trying to shove her treadmill against the wall of Jess’s former bedroom. “It’s just . . . do you have any idea how long that’s going to be?”

  “I’m not cut out for Manhattan,” Jess finally said. “I tried it for eight years, and I’m just not supposed to be there.” She sat on the portion of her bed that wasn’t covered with stacks of printouts of profiles of her mother’s potential Jdates. Gloria sat beside her and stroked Jess’s forehead with her cool hand. Jess braced herself for the pep talk: Of course you are, honey! You can do whatever you want to do! Instead, her mother sighed and said, “So then you’ll find the place you’re supposed to be.”

  • • •

  Jess began sleeping until after eleven o’clock every day, staying up all night, watching infomercials on her mother’s gigantic new television set and subsisting on a diet of those sweetened, artificial-everything cereals she’d never been allowed to eat as a child. She e-mailed Namita and said she was fine. The one time Billy’s number had shown up on her cell phone, she’d punched “Ignore” and gone to the kitchen for more milk. After two weeks of breakfast food and bad TV, an unfamiliar number with a 917 area code appeared on her telephone’s screen and, out of idle curiosity, Jess answered it.

  Big mistake. “Jessica?” Toby demanded, in her familiar grating voice. “Steven moved in last week and he can’t find the spare key to the linen closet.”

  Jess blinked, then rubbed her eyes. On TV, an actress she remembered from two decades ago was trying to convince her that an at-home teeth-bleaching system would revolutionize her smile, and possibly even her life. “It’s on the top of the little ledge, right next to the . . .”

  “No, no, that’s where you said it was, but it isn’t there.” Toby whined.

  “Oh.” Jess sat up straight, sending her empty cereal bowl clattering to the floor. “Well, maybe . . .”

  “I think maybe you should just stop by sometime tonight, help him find the damn key.”

  “Well, but the thing is, I’m actually . . .”

  “Eight o’clock. He works late. His name’s Steven.” Click. Toby was gone. Hopefully forever.

  • • •

  If life were a movie, Jess would have looked into Steven Ostrowsky’s eyes and fallen deeply and immediately in love. There would have been a whirlwind courtship (during which Toby would have died, conveniently and very painfully) and soon Jess would have found herself reinstalled in the apartment that had formerly been hers, sharing it with a rising star in the world of investment banking and planning their life together. It would have been a shoe-in for the “Vows” column, with a headline involving some witty wordplay on listings and love.

  In real life, Steven was Toby in male form, with the same bowling-pin-shaped body, twitchy gaze, and negligible social skills. He leaned against the door frame as his eyes darted from Jess’s hair to her breasts to her hair to her hips to her chest again.

  “I’ve looked everywhere,” he said, before retreating to the living room, now full of leather-and-chrome furniture, glass bookcases filled with DVDs and compact discs, and not a single book. Jess stood on her tiptoes and ran her fingertips along the little ledge over the linen closet door and found the key on her first try. She pulled on her coat and flipped the key onto a stainless-steel assemblage that she supposed was meant to be a table.

  “Hey, thanks!” said Steven, pulling his iPod earbuds free and staring at her again. Breast, hips, crotch, face, breasts. “This is a great place. Where’d you move?”

  “Vegas,” she said, and let the door slam shut behind her.

  • • •

  She took the bus back to Montclair, slept in her old bed for eighteen hours straight, woke up the next morning, washed her face, combed her hair, and got a job as a waitress (“Jess, you’re wasting your potential!” moaned her mother, on her way out the door to another Jdate). She worked nights at a diner and mornings in a day-care center. (“Wiping two-year-olds’ butts!” said Namita, and rolled her eyes. “This is not what we went to college for!”) For six months, Jess ran a concession cart at the airport called Access-Your-Eyes, which sold knockoff designer sunglasses. (“Are you having some kind of a breakdown?” Gloria inquired over the sound of the dishwasher. “Is that what this is? Because help is available. There are new antidepressants, honey. I see ads for them on TV all the time. You don’t have to suffer!”)

  When she was thirty-one Jess landed a position as an assistant to a professor of women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, helping her organize a conference on reproductive rights. (“Philadelphia,” Namita snorted. “Just because the Times thinks it’s the sixth borough doesn’t mean it’s true.”)

  “You did wonderful work,” the professor said at the end of the summer. “I can offer you a full-time job as a researcher, but it doesn’t pay much.” Jess told her the money was fine and didn’t mention that she had a nest egg. She moved out of Montclair and into an apartment on Delancey Street, a walk-up on the third floor of a big brick rowhouse, on a block lined with trees whose leafy branches arched over the street. In the winter, kids pulled their sleds on the sidewalk past her front door. After walking past a little shop on Pine Street once a week for a year, she finally signed up for a knitting class, and surprised herself by enjoying it. She made scarves, then sweaters, baby hats for her cousin’s kids, a shawl for Namita, an afghan of scarlet and gold for herself. T
here was a skylight in her bedroom, and she’d lie underneath it, bundled in the blanket she’d made, with a cup of peppermint tea next to her reading lamp, watching the flakes swirl down, thinking, I did all right for myself. I did all right, after all.

  Three years later, Jess’s building came up for sale and she decided to buy it. Her nest egg would more than make a down payment, and she’d been promoted twice at Penn, which would give her enough to pay the mortgage. “A good investment,” proclaimed Gloria. “I guess it’s all right,” allowed Namita, who’d moved from the Upper East Side to the trendy West Village to cohabitate with an arbitrageur named Claude. On a brisk Monday morning in January, Jess pulled on her red wool coat. She went to the bank for a cashier’s check, then walked three blocks to the real estate office on Walnut Street, where settlement would be made.

  “Ms. Norton?” said the man behind the desk. “You’re a little early.” He introduced himself as David Stuart, took her coat, poured her coffee, got her settled in another wheeled leather chair in front of another conference room table. He had curly blond hair and red cheeks, as if he’d spent the weekend outside, in the wind and the sun. She imagined him towing a sled behind him, on his way to the park. There were pictures of two little blond boys in snowsuits on his desk. She added them to the picture.

  “So,” he said, offering her cream and sugar, “you’re going to be a homeowner.”

  “It’s not my first time,” Jess said. “I had a place in New York a few years back. On the Upper West Side.”

  He whistled softly. “Bet you made a bundle.”

  “I did all right.”

  “But you like it better here, right?”

  “Well, I guess I’d better,” she said. “Now that I’m buying.”

  “I love it here,” he told her, eyes shining as if he was trying to sell her something, as if she hadn’t already come to buy. “I mean, New York’s great—it’s New York, right? But Philadelphia feels more like a real neighborhood to me. People hold doors for ladies with strollers. There’s this cheese shop on my block . . .” But before he could tell her about the cheese shop, the Carluccis, the sellers, bustled in with their agent and a box of angel wings, crisp-thin pieces of fried dough dusted with powdered sugar. “We’re so happy for you, Jess,” said Mrs. Carlucci, passing Jess a pastry on a napkin.