Engaging Men (28 page)

“She’s fine,” I replied, remembering how fine Grace had looked, shaking it for all she was worth on that dance floor— as if she had some demons to exorcise.

“She still going with that nice young man she told me about when she was here for dinner last? What was his name?”

“Drew. And no, they broke up,” I said, realizing Drew was the demon Grace was probably trying to shake. I still didn’t get it, sex with socks notwithstanding.

“That’s too bad,” my mother said, echoing my thoughts. “But she’ll meet someone else. She always does, that one.” Then she laughed. “Maybe that’s just it—maybe our Grade has too many options!”

“Maybe.” I wondered suddenly if the only reason I was with Kirk was because I truly believed I had run out of options. No way, I thought, remembering the myriad men who had asked me to dance. God, I was on fire tonight. I couldn’t remember being desired by so many men at once in my life. Maybe I looked like I was almost engaged. Hell, once I got a ring out of Kirk, I’d probably have to beat them off with a stick. Somehow this thought wasn’t soothing. Why were men so contrary? They wanted us when we didn’t want them, and wanted nothing to do with us the moment we wanted to hold on to them forever. Yeah, I was going to meet Kirk’s parents next weekend, but judging from the amount of time we’d spent together since that illustrious decision was made, I barely felt like I had a boyfriend anymore, much less a future husband.

I sighed, shrugging off the thought and pushing away my now-empty bowl of pastina. “Thanks, Ma. That really hit the spot.”

She smiled at me, her eyes tired.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up and all…”

“Me? I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, waving a hand in the air as if sleeping was never an issue with her. That probably wasn’t too far from the truth. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she hadn’t shut her eyes since that awful night when my father shut his forever.

“Your grandmother and her shenanigans kept me up till all hours. You know that Artie Matarrazzo’s car was parked out front until about fifteen minutes before you got here?”

“You’re kidding?”

“Oh, yeah. So I go down there to find out what in God’s name that man is doing in her apartment at two o’clock in the morning, and she answers the door in a robe and says they’re playing cards. Playing cards! And she’s looking at me with this smile on her face like she’s just won a round of strip poker!”

“Ma, c’mon. What is he, eighty-six years old? He can’t—I mean, he probably isn’t even in working condition.”

“Oh, he’s working all right. You know I was doing your grandmother’s laundry the other day, and what do you think I

found in there? A pair of Fruit of the Looms. And I know they weren’t either of your brothers‘.“

Uh-oh. It looked like Nonnie was getting a little more than those nickels she bet during her friendly little card games. Suddenly I felt like one of us should talk to her. But what would we talk to her about, exactly? Safe sex? She was eighty-four years old. I guess she didn’t have much to worry about. Except maybe a heart attack.

“Do you think it’s healthy?” I asked, suddenly afraid Nonnie, who’d had an angioplasty not even three years ago, couldn’t take whatever she was getting from good old Artie Matarrazzo.

“Healthy! It’s downright outrageous!”

But what was even more outrageous, I discovered a short while later, was that my mother had turned my bedroom into a veritable shrine to my father. The closet was filled with all those old clothes of his she’d been advised by everyone to throw away and which she’d only managed to move into another room. And there were photos of him everywhere—at least a half dozen of them tucked into the Sacred Heart she had placed by the door. But then, all of our pictures were tucked into that colorful portrait of Jesus, because my mother believed that she somehow bought us extra protection from God by keeping our images close to the gilt-framed oil she’d gotten at Kings Plaza. I stopped to study it now, as my mother came in to turn down the bed (yes, I could have done it myself, but I decided not to deny my mother the pleasure of treating me like the child she believed I still was). There were pictures of me and Sonny and Joey as kids. Sonny and Vanessa on their wedding day. Joey and, yes, Miranda, too, standing proudly with Timmy and Tracy in front of a Christmas tree. Grace, of course, was there, as Ma had always considered Grace a part of our family. The photo, which was taken back in junior high, featured Grace and me in matching halter tops that Nonnie had bought us at Alexander’s (Grace, of course, was already starting to fill hers out), smiling smugly, as if we owned the world. And we did own it then, I thought. My eye strayed next to a photo of Justin, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, a half-eaten dish of pasta before him and a bright smile on his face. My mother had tucked his photo there after he’d fallen off a ladder on the set and broken his leg a few years back.

Kirk, I noticed, was suspiciously absent.

“Hey, Ma, how come you don’t have Kirk in here?” I said.

“Huh?” she said, stepping behind me to study the photos there. “It must have fallen out,” she said, though her tone implied she’d probably taken it out. I knew exactly when she’d done it, too—-just after she had learned that Kirk had gone home to see his parents without me. Apparently, she hadn’t forgiven him, and I wondered what it would take to make her see that we were meant to be? A wedding? Maybe not even then, I realized with a feeling of dread.

“Oh, look at him,” my mother said, interrupting my thoughts as she reached out to touch, somewhat reverently, a photo of her and my father, probably taken when they were both mid-twenty-something—I knew because my father was leaning proudly against the brand-new Cadillac he had bought just after Joey was born and his business was taking ofF.“He was so handsome, your father, may he rest in peace.”

“Yeah, he was,” I said softly, studying his twinkling dark eyes and Hollywood smile. My father could have been an actor, I thought, studying his face and trying to see him as someone I didn’t know—a stranger I just happened to see on the big screen. He’d been gone four years now—it seemed like forever. He felt like a stranger to me. Had I ever really known him? I wondered, thinking of all those conversations we never had.

“I was lucky to love a man like that,” my mother said now, bringing her hand to her mouth thoughtfully and then turning to me, her eyes searching mine, almost anxiously. “You gotta love a man like that, Angela. A man who loves you the way your father loved me. You hear me? You don’t settle for anything less, you hear me?” she insisted, grabbing my shoulders as if she were about to shake me.

“Ow!” I said, shrugging off her painful grasp. “You’re hurting me!”

“All right, all right!” she said, pulling me toward her for a hug that was even more painful before she swept out of the room.

Leaving me standing there before the Sacred Heart, staring at a yellowed photograph of a man I never really knew holding the only woman he had ever loved, and wondering if love like that really existed, outside of an old photograph or my mother’s still-grief-stricken mind.

I came home the next day after a too-long day at Lee and Laurie feeling lower than low. I had been late, of course, having had to trek all the way there from Brooklyn. And hungover, as well. As was Michelle, though she’d never let you know it. She made just as light of her drinking the night before as she did of her drunken antics. “It’s not like I slept with the guy!” she’d replied, dismissing the act that could have wrecked her marriage as nothing more than a harmless dalliance. Somehow her lack of a response made me even sadder. Was nothing sacred anymore?

“You’re home,” Justin said, looking up hopefully from sofa #3, where I found him sitting once I came through the door. He said it as if I were the one who had been spending so much time away from the apartment.

Still, it was a comfort that he missed me. I could see in his eyes a loneliness that mirrored my own.

“No Smirk tonight?”

I smiled. “No Smirk tonight.” Then, looking at the digital camera he held in his hands, “No hanging with the guys from the crew tonight?”

“Nah. The gig is over. Besides, those guys were beginning to get on my nerves. All Pete keeps talking about is that feature film he’s planning on making. If he can ever find an investor,” he added, with a snort that indicated he had little faith in Pete’s big dreams.

It sounded to me like a reflection of his lack of faith in his own dreams. “What are you doing?” I asked, watching as he slipped a disk into the camera.

“Oh, I was gonna go take a walk, shoot some film. Wanna come?”

I didn’t know whether it was the look on Justin’s face—a mixture of hope and something else I couldn’t quite place—or a desire to escape the apartment and the phone that I was sure would remain silent while Kirk worked the night away, but I found myself nodding.

Two subways later, I found myself on the Upper West Side, uncertain what mission had led Justin here, but satisfied to walk in companionable silence beside him as we headed down W. 71st Street, except for the odd moment when Justin would remark upon a particularly artful doorway before turning the camera on it to record. I smiled every time he did it, and remembered how many times we had taken this type of stroll together, aimlessly into the night, while Justin simultaneously tried to take in every crevice, every scarred storefront, every stony facade, with his camera.

Finally I spoke, giving voice to all the doubts that had been plaguing me during these many lonely nights without Kirk .“Do you think some people are meant to be together?”

Justin shrugged. Then, easing the camera away from his eye, he looked at me. “I dunno.”

“What about you and Lauren?” I persisted. “Do you think you’ll wind up together?”

He thought about this for a moment. “Sure.Why not? I mean, who knows what will happen when she gets back from Florida?”

If she gets back, I thought but didn’t say. Lauren seemed quite devoted to that repertory company, and I’d never understood why Justin hadn’t broken it off when she’d decided to stay on for a second season. Maybe he really was in love with her. Or maybe he was a commitment-phobe. Like you are, a little voice whispered in my head. Stop that, you love Kirk, I reminded myself. Love, love, love…

“Grace and Drew broke up, you know,” I blurted now, dispelling the anxious chatter in my head and replacing it with a whole new set of worries. After all, it was easier to worry about someone else. And I was worried about Grace. Especially now that I had finally been forced to accept that she and Drew were really over. Up until last night, I secretly had harbored hopes that they would get back together. So much hope, that until now I hadn’t even told Justin they were through.

“Is that right?” he said. Then he laughed. Laughed. “Well, I could see that coming.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“God, the way he hung on her. No woman likes that. Especially a woman like Grace.”

Trying not to acknowledge how much it bothered me that Justin had noticed so much about Grace, I asked, “And what kind of woman is Grace, exactly?”

“Difficult,” he said. Then, sliding a glance at me, he added, “Kinda like you.” Suddenly he trained his camera on me, probably because he sensed I was about to burst out in a tirade over that comment and he knew I’d never do it on film.

“Shut it off, Justin,” I said, looking away. “Please.”

He sighed, then put the camera down.

“I’m difficult?”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” he said, studying the camera with new interest.

“So what did you mean?”

He looked up at me, studying my face thoughtfully. “I meant…complex. Kind of like an aged wine.”

Great. Now I was old. “So, what—men should only date women under thirty, is that it?” I asked, thinking of Lauren, a ripe old twenty-five. What was Justin doing with a twenty-five-year-old anyway? He was a year older than I was!

“Forget it,” he said. Then, with the wisdom of a man who knew better than to go any further in this conversation with a woman—especially the woman he had to live with—he suddenly pointed into the distance and exclaimed, “Now, that, Angie, that is an entryway. See that? C’mon.” He rushed ahead, leaving me with nothing to do but follow helplessly along.

“That’s gotta be a Stanford White building,” he said, naming his favorite architect (also a New Yorker, of course) before he raised his camera once more and began to film what did look to be an extraordinary arch over an elaborate door.

As I stood before the building, studying the grandness of the architecture, I felt the fight die out of me. What were my problems in the face of all this greatness?

So I stood there taking in Justin as he took it all in with his camera. I thought for a moment that he had forgotten I was even there, until he stepped back, put the camera down and turned to me, the look on his face ponderous. And somewhat sad.

“You know what today is?” he said.

“No, Justin, I don’t know what today is. And I’m not just being difficult,” I replied, still bothered by his comment.

“August twenty-fourth.”

“Yeah, so wh—” I began, then I remembered. And was ashamed for not remembering sooner. Justin’s parents had died this day, twenty years ago.

“Oh, Justin, I’m sorry, I—”

But he wasn’t listening to my lame attempt to make up for the fact that I had been so self-absorbed lately I didn’t even remember the day Justin paid reverence to yearly. Usually with me, though I guess I hadn’t been much of a friend these days…

“They met here, you know. In New York. Somewhere in this neighborhood, I think. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes, you did,” I said, peering up at him, trying to see through to the emotion he was clearly struggling with. It was an emotion I knew well, having lost my own father. But I had been luckier than Justin. I had had my father for so much longer, while Justin had lost both his parents at age twelve. He’d been just a boy. Probably not looking very different from the way he did now as he gazed down at me, his eyes a mixture of hopefulness and harrowing sadness.

“I know this is going to sound kinda hokey, but—”he began, then laughed and looked away. “But sometimes I imagine that I’m recording all this for them, you know? It amazes me that they’ll never see any of this again. These buildings. That tree. None of it.”