Engaging Men (13 page)

“Westport, Connecticut?” I asked, astonished.

“Yeah,” she replied blandly. “His boss just bought a three-bedroom and has convinced Drew that the burbs is the place to be. To be honest, I think he’s just looking for a golf partner, but now Drew is suddenly hellbent on finding a house.”

“Grace, you realize what this means, don’t you?”

“Well, for one thing, Drew’s gonna get a nice little tax writeoff next year.”

For such a smart woman, she was incredibly dense sometimes. “He’s nesting, Grace. And he’s taking you right with him!”

“Oh, c’mon, Ange, we’ve been together barely a year.”

But I was sure that Grace was simply ignoring the facts. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was engaged by Christmas and living inWestport by next spring! The thought filled me with sadness. Grace was going to leave me alone and single in New York City.

I had to get Kirk on board—and fast.

And so I sat listening raptly the next day during a break at Lee and Laurie while Michelle informed me of the third and final step. “Assume the position.”

What this meant, of course, was that I needed to become such an intricate part of Kirk’s life that he didn’t know where his life ended and mine began. Essentially, I needed to become his wife…in every way.

I started spending even more time at Kirk’s place. Even went as far as surprising him with dinner when he came home from work. Granted it was linguine marinara (I wasn’t risking anything after the meat fiasco), but he seemed quite happy to come home and find me and a hot meal waiting.

Still, I knew there was only one way for a woman to gain true intimacy with a man in New York City. And that was by sharing the one thing that came at a premium in this fine metropolis: closet space.

It’s true I had already made some gains in this area. An anti-histamine in the medicine cabinet, a bottle of spray gel on the toilet tank. A travel-size box of tampons tucked into the carryall basket kept beneath the sink. I even had some workout clothes lingering in the depths of one of Kirk’s drawers, for those rare occasions when I felt a need to leave his apartment for a jog. But I had yet to traverse the Great Divide and gain a drawer in the neat little bureau in his bedroom or, even more important, a permanent place in his orderly closet. It wasn’t for lack of effort, either. I had been known, in the almost two years we’d been together, to leave behind the occasional bra in the bed, jeans on floor or dress on the back of the door, mostly due to my own disorganization rather than any concerted design. But every time my clothes started to accumulate in his apartment, Kirk would gather them together, and at fairly regular intervals I would be confronted with a tidy bundle to take home. Not that I had minded, really. In fact, there was nothing more irritating to me than to be home dressing for a night out with friends or even an audition (not that I’d been on any of those lately), only to discover that that black stretchy tank I had my heart set on wearing was at least four stops away on the Ml5 bus.

But now I had more important considerations than what I would be wearing that night. Like where I would be spending the rest of my life. Or, more specifically, with whom.

I started out slowly, so as not to raise any suspicion: a pair of jeans here, a T-shirt there. Even managed to slip a pair of slides onto the shoe tree on the floor of his closet. And when, after a few weeks during which I had managed to accumulate a verifiable wardrobe at Kirk’s place, I was confronted with the inevitable shopping bag—from Banana Republic, the only clothing store Kirk ever seemed to venture into—I stood ready to stake my claim.

“Uh, do you think maybe I could leave some of this stuff…here? You know, for when I stay over,” I said as Kirk tried to press said shopping bag into my hand one afternoon when I had dropped by in the hopes of scoring some quality time (read: sex) between jobs (cut me some slack, okay? I was stressed out about this game playing. I needed some kind of...release).

I nearly lost heart at the sight of what I perceived to be abject fear crossing Kirk’s face.

After a few horrifying moments of pensive silence, he said carefully,“! suppose we could do that…”

I practically skipped all the way to the wall-to-wall closet behind Kirk, where he had wandered, seemingly in a daze.

Sliding open the door, he stood, arms folded, contemplating the space I was about to invade.

I’ll admit, the sight of all that closet room filled my heart with greed. Especially since my own meager closet was crammed full of God-knows-what (when it came to clothes, I was just like Justin—unable to part with anything, right down to the bridesmaid dress I had worn in my brother Sonny’s wedding, six years ago). As I stood beside Kirk, visions of all that outerwear I never had a place for in the summer months filling in all the gaps between the line of button-downs and Dockers that barely filled that expansive space (I mean, leaving that much room between hangers was practically a crime in a city this cramped), I must have been holding my breath in sheer anticipation, because I suddenly felt it burst out of my mouth when I heard Kirk’s next words.

“Maybe a pair of jeans. There really isn’t much room…”

“A pair of jeans? A pair ofjeans?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well, gosh, Noodles, it’s not like you’re moving in…”

That’s when I let him have it. I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” I said, “but I practically live here during the week. And every day I’m packing a bag, wondering do I need a sweater tomorrow or will a tank be fine? Can I stick with sandals or is it going to rain? Thank God for the weatherman. At least Al Roker cares whether or not I’m going to spend my day shivering and wet. It’s a good thing we never actually go out anywhere, because deciding on a daily basis on a change of clothes that will take me from day to evening might just…just kill me!”

Now, admittedly, I was exaggerating.Though it’s true that I’m an anxious packer. Don’t ask me why limiting myself to whatever I could put into a knapsack sent me into the kind of tizzy that most people reserved for the bigger questions of life—like what to name their first child, or which mutual fund to dump their life savings into. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I needed to get a life. A real life.

“We go out…” he said finally, avoiding the real issue.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is, I need a real place—“ in your life I wanted to say, but prudently refrained from doing so ”—in your closet.“

“I’m sorry, Noodles. I suppose it isn’t fair to ask you to lug all that stuff back and forth…”

And so that’s how I gained a whole foot and a half of hanger space in Kirk’s wall-to-wall. Because if nothing else, Kirk was all about being fair. And even if I had been hoping to appeal to something other than his innate sense of justice, a girl had to take her gains where she could, right?

Here were other gains as well. Immeasurable things, like the way Kirk consulted me on the choice of a new shower curtain or how he linked his arm protectively around me when a ranting homeless man lumbered too close one night as Kirk walked me home. He even starting talking about a vacation together in the winter.

“…someplace romantic, like the Bahamas,” he said one dreamy night as we lay in his bed curled together under the covers. This was big—in my mind, anyway. Up until then, we had only done spontaneous weekends away whenever Kirk found a lull in his workload—out to the vineyards on the North Fork of Long Island, or to the mountains of Upstate New York. I couldn’t attribute this new development entirely to my Calvins in Kirk’s closet. Or the fact that he’d even gone so far as to give me a drawer in his triple dresser (significant, considering it was the only dresser in his apartment). It was as if the fact of my very real existence in his life had sunk in.

It hadn’t sunk in for my mother, however. “You’re bringing him?” she asked after browbeating me into a Sunday dinner in

Brooklyn. I was long overdue for a visit—probably because I was anxious about the damage my sometimes overbearing mother might do to my relationship during this delicate lid-loosening process. I discovered I had reason to worry.

“Of course,” I replied, suddenly realizing that while my relationship with Kirk had moved to a new level, Kirk’s relationship with my family had sunk to an all-time low.

“Humph” was all she said to that. “Well, at this point I wouldn’t care if you brought Jack the Ripper. Do you know it’s been over a month since you even set foot in Brooklyn? I’m not getting any younger, Angela. And neither is your grandmother. Though judging from the way she’s running around with that Artie Matarrazzo, you’d think she was sixteen.”

“Is that still going on?” I asked, incredulous.

“Going on?” she replied. “He comes over here three, four times a week now. Taking her to the park, food shopping. Do you know, the other day I came home and found him in her apartment, setting her hair? And she’s sitting there, her shirt damp from shampooing in the sink, or God knows what, and you can see right through it from here to…to Christmas!”

Oh my. Clearly Nonnie was getting in…deep.

“And I’m standing there, feeling like some kind of damn fool for interrupting. Me! Last time I checked,
I
was the one setting her hair on Monday nights…”

Now we had gotten to the heart of the matter. My mother, left without Nonnie to care for, didn’t feel needed anymore.

“Ma, maybe now that Nonnie is busy with…with someone, maybe you need to find some other way to spend your time. Maybe take up a hobby…”

“A hobby? What do I need with a hobby? I have your father’s tomato plants.”

That, precisely, was the problem. They were my father’s tomato plants. Ma never really had anything of her own, and now that my father was gone, she seemed to be devoting the rest of her life to keeping alive whatever remained from his.

“Ma, I’m talking about something you need.”

“I have my family,” she replied simply. “What more do I need?”

Obviously nothing else, I thought when I arrived at the house on Sunday with Kirk in tow. I should have been worried at the way my mother’s eyes narrowed at Kirk. Should have realized that she had taken his absence last time—and the reason for it-—as some kind of betrayal, on my behalf. But I could hardly explain to her the new strides I had made, relationship-wise. My mother would take the fact that I was practically living at Kirk’s as some kind of cardinal sin rather than the leap forward I knew it to be.