Engaging Men (8 page)

I heard a key slide in the door. Or maybe he decided to drop by!

“Hey,” came the sound of Justin’s voice in the hall.What was

I thinking? Dropping by wasn’t the kind of thing Kirk did, after all. It wasn’t that he was unromantic, just…orderly.

“Hey,” I said, joining Justin in the living room, where he was toeing off his sneakers and settling in on sofa #3. “Lauren get off the ground okay?” I asked, my face a mask of concern. The subtext of my question was: Any delays at the airport that I should know about?

“Without a hitch,” he replied, his gaze falling on the dining room table with the two wineglasses. “God, I hated seeing her go.“

My stomach plummeted at his forlorn expression, and I remembered suddenly what it was like to really miss someone. The look on Justin’s face was the kind every girl pines for.

But it was only momentary, that look. For, suddenly, Justin glanced at the clock and snapped to attention. “Hey, mind if I put on the game? I just heard in the cab that the Yankees are up by three against the Red Sox.” He grabbed the remote.

I had my answer. The Yankees were playing the Red Sox. Kirk was a Red Sox fan. Was it possible he got home and immediately flipped on the TV to catch the rest of the game?

I glanced over at Justin as he pounded a fist in the air. “Yea!” he roared along with the crowd on TV.

Oh, yeah. It was not only possible, it was probable.

Despite the fact that I was annoyed at being beat out by baseball, I joined Justin on the couch, never mind that I was a Mets fan, mostly by birth rather than from any true allegiance to game watching. Yeah, I could sympathize. I had watched the subway series with great trepidation. But it wasn’t something I worked up a sweat about on a regular basis. Wasn’t something I ignored friends, families and people I allegedly loved for.

The clock ticked on.Justin became more jubilant with every pitch. The Yankees were up by five now. By the time I did talk to Kirk, he wasn’t exactly going to be Mr. Happy. I thought about calling him during the game, but didn’t want him if his attention was going to be divided. I decided to wait until the seventh-inning stretch.

When the seventh inning finally arrived and a Yankee win was all but secured, Justin decided this called for an all-out celebration. “I’m going down for beer and chicken wings. Want anything?”

“No, no. I’m good,” I said, making my way casually over to my bedroom, where I hoped to make my long-awaited phone call with Kirk in privacy. I was so high-strung at this point, I feared I might do something I’d later regret—like yell.

Kirk picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Noodles, I was just about to call you…”

Ah, if I could only have waited thirty more seconds, I would have had the upper hand. Still, I was glad to hear his voice. I missed him. “The lure of baseball was too great, huh?” I joked.

“You kidding? I couldn’t bear to watch that travesty once I saw the score. I shut it right off.”

Oh, brother. Then, asjf to answer my unasked question—What exactly have you been doing in the one hour and fifteen minutes you’ve been home and not calling me?—he said, “I’ve just been settling in, unpacking.”

Uh-huh. “Did you have a good weekend?” I asked, trying to rise above it all.

“Great,” he said, his voice perking up.Then he proceeded to tell me, in lavish detail, all about it. Playing touch football with his cousins in the legendary acre lot his parents lived on (legendary to me, who had never actually seen it); holding his sister Kate’s baby; meeting his other sister Kayla’s boyfriend. All the children in Kirk’s family had first names beginning with K. His mother’s idea, according to Kirk. I wonder if she realized that she had created KKK with her alliteratively named progeny? The funny thing was, Kate had married a guy named Kenneth, and their new baby’s name was—guess what?—Kim-berly. I wondered now if the other sister had managed to line up a K-man with this new boyfriend. Hey, wait a second. New boyfriend? Kayla’s new boyfriend was there?

“Um…how long has your sister been seeing this guy?” I asked, hoping “new” boyfriend meant new to Kirk but practically married to Kayla. After all, that was the only reason I could drum up why Karl, Kasper, Kirby, or whatever the hell his name was, had been invited and I hadn’t.

“I dunno. Couple of months?”

Couple of months? Remain cool, remain calm.

“Seems like a nice enough guy, but who knows? Kayla goes through guys like they’re going out of style.”

Remain cool, remain calm. Get the facts. “So, um, does anyone ever ask about your girlfriend, sweetie?” I knew it sounded like I was fishing, but there was no other way to do this. I had to know.

“Oh, yeah. My mother’s always harping on that subject, ever since Susan and I broke up. She always liked Susan…”

Liked Susan…

“But I learned my lesson that time around. Telling my family about stuff like that is like feeding hungry piranhas. They don’t let up.”

“Stuff like what?”

“You know, who I’m dating, whatever.”

Whatever. “Kirk, do you mean to tell me that after almost two years, your parents don’t know I exist?”

“Oh, they know I’m dating someone. But that’s all their getting outta me. Besides, they know I’m intent on getting my business off the ground…”

“Excuse me, Kirk. Someone? You’re dating someone?”

Silence on the other end. The dumb lug probably just realized he’d stepped on a land mine with his blithe comments.

Finally he said, “You know what I mean, Ange. Didn’t you tell me the less your mother knew about your daily life, the better?”

“I was talking about stuff like what I ate, how late I stayed out. Not the person I’m contemplating marrying!”

A new silence descended, this one a bit more harrowing. But no worse than the sigh that finally emerged, the words that followed. “Ange, you know how I feel about that…”

I did?

“My whole focus now is on building my business. I thought you understood. I thought…”

But I was no longer listening. I was tired of what he thought. It was just so…unromantic. I wanted to be caught up in a passion. I wanted a man to want me so badly it hurt to imagine life without me. And I wanted it with Kirk. Was that so much to ask for?

That’s how it happened. I suddenly found myself putting step one of Michelle’s engagement scheme into action. I don’t know why I succumbed. Maybe it was the fact of my absence (both literal and figurative) from Kirk’s big family weekend. Maybe it was the blase tone Kirk used when he said before hanging up, “Hey, when you come over tomorrow night, could you bring my U2 CD?”

See? This is where we’re at. We don’t even ask each other out anymore. It’s all assumed.

Naturally, I had to start shaking up some of those assumptions. “Uh…actually, tomorrow night I’m meeting up with Grace.‘”There! Take that!

“Oh. Okay.Where’re you going?”

Wouldn’t you like to know, I thought, feeling a tad triumphant. Until I remembered /didn’t know where I was going with Grace, who didn’t yet know we were going anywhere. “Shopping.”

“Have fun,” he said, as if I’d said I was having my body dipped in hot wax. Kirk was not a shopper, unless we were in say, CompUSA. “You could come by after, if you felt like it…” he offered.

“Oh, well, I’ll probably be too tired. You know shopping wears me out.”

“Okay. I guess it’s just as well. I’ve got a lot of catch-up to do with work—I could stand to put in a little overtime. In fact, I’m gonna hit the sack now. I got a big day ahead of me tomorrow.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said and, after a muttered goodbye, I hung up the phone, dissatisfied. This lid might need the rubber glove treatment. Or maybe even a sledgehammer.

“Just sit tight,” Michelle advised at work the following Tuesday, when I informed her that I had put step one of her plan in action. “Give it a few days.”

“A few days?” I didn’t think I’d last that long. As it turned out, Grace had had plans with Drew last night and couldn’t be lured to Bloomingdale’s even to make an honest woman out of me. And since tonight she was attending some work-related cocktail party, I was faced with going straight home from Lee and Laurie to another fun evening at home.

So I sat tight.After all, I had plenty of couches to choose from.

Thank God for our large-screen TV, a hand-me-down from Justin’s friend C.J., who had married his long-time girlfriend, Danielle, and moved on to Westchester and a forty-two-inch. The only thing on, of course, was Friends, and, somehow, tonight I just couldn’t deal with it.

Deprivation was going to be a lot harder on me than on Kirk, I could tell.

Because the truth of the matter was, I had done that shameful thing that most women do when they get too cozy in a relationship. I had thrown over my own life for the sake of our life together. Take an average week in my life:

Monday: Rise and Shine, which I only get through at six o’clock on a Monday morning by telling myself that I am going to buy Backstage this week and begin to search for that great film or TV role I plan to land now that I have TV experience on my resume and union cards from both AFTRA (for TV—see what a few leaps in front of a camera can get you?) and the Screen Actor’s Guild. But what usually happens is, I bypass the newsstand on the way home from the studio and pay a surprise visit to Kirk at his home office, where we eat bagels and lox until Kirk realizes he has too much work to do to sit around all day eating bagels and lox and sends me on my way.

Tuesday: Rise and Shine. Maybe breakfast with Colin. Maybe I buy Backstage today, but usually just go home to watch a movie (we have a hell of collection, mostly due to Justin) or read the complete plays of August Strindberg (if I really want to depress myself) until I realize it’s 2:10 and I’m never going to make it to Lee and Laurie on time for my three-to-ten shift. Rush to shower and change, arrive at Lee and Laurie at three-fifteen. Leave work at ten, take the crosstown bus to Kirk’s (thus securing myself sex and saving myself a transfer to the Second Avenue bus, which never comes every ten minutes like it says it will on the schedule posted at the bus stop).

Wednesday: Rise and Shine. Sometimes Rena wants to have a planning meeting, and then Colin and I have to sit and listen to her drone on and on about her dream plans for Rise and Shine. Go to lunch with Colin, complain about Rena (whom Colin

defends), until it’s time for Lee and Laurie. Get off at ten, go to Kirk’s.

Thursday: Rise and Shine. Maybe breakfast with Colin, after which I decide that that the edition of Backstage on the stands is too old and not worth spending the cash on. Sometimes I go home to clean my apartment (a fruitless endeavor with Justin as a roommate, but I can’t seem to stop myself), or sometimes I find myself lured in to some treacherous sample sale, where I spend the afternoon trying to convince myself of the utter necessity of owning yet another stretchy black shirt. If I’ve dawdled in midtown long enough, I usually just go straight to Lee and Laurie. Sometimes I’m even on time! And guess where I head afterward? Kirk’s, of course.

Friday: Rise and Shine. And since I have no shift at Lee and Laurie and no desire to start any self-actualizing project, I find some way to waste the entire day. Like renting the complete movies of Bette Davis. Or giving myself a pedicure. Until Kirk and I go out for dinner, or simply sit around the apartment like the old married couple we are (not that he realizes that).

Saturday: The dreaded ten-to-four shift at Lee and Laurie. After a day like this, can you blame me for going straight to Kirk’s, where we order takeout and while the evening away in front of the TV or at the movies?

Sunday: Day of rest. Except when my mother manages to convince me of the utter necessity of my coming down to Marine Park for family dinner. Kirk comes, of course. After all, he loves my mother’s cooking. Kirk never says no to a Sunday in Brooklyn.

Now do you understand how I’ve gotten so wrapped up in being wrapped up every day of the week? Kirk and I might as well get married at this point. What would be the difference, anyway?

“The ring,” Michelle explained somewhat impatiently when I complained the next day about how much I am suffering and wondering, really, what it’s all going to get me.

“When a guy buys you a ring, it means something.” So I sat tight for yet another night, telling Kirk I had a monologue I was working on.“Oh yeah?” he said with surprise.

Of course he was surprised. I hadn’t done any auditioning since Rise and Shine became a cable-access phenomenon.Why should I? I was on the road to superstardom in a yellow leotard.

But suddenly there I was, reverting to my former self. The actor who had played Fefu in Fefu and Her Friends. (Don’t let the name fool you—this was a serious role.) The woman who had once wowed crowds at the Classic Stage Company with my powerful rendition of Miss Julie. In case you were wondering, I was once a force to be reckoned with. But an actor has to earn a living…

“What are you doing home?” Justin asked, loping in from God knows where. He’d turned down the last production gig he’d been offered, so I knew he hadn’t been working on the set all day. In fact, he seemed to be working less and less ever since he had landed a few commercial spots for a long-distance telephone service a year ago, which I thought was pretty ironic, considering the number of long-distance relationships Justin had been in (yes, Lauren wasn’t the only one. Denise, his previous girlfriend, was from Oak Park, Illinois, Justin’s hometown—a place Justin hadn’t lived in himself since he was twelve, although his romance with Denise had begun on a visit to relatives one summer when he was in college).The commercial, which featured Justin looking frazzled and gorgeous as he ran across a campus and up the dormitory stairs, all in time to pick up a long-distance call from his mom, was so well received that they made two more. One in which Justin leaped across buildings to pick up a call, and another where he hijacked a campus security cart. His success had mostly to do with that utterly beatific smile on his face as he picked up the receiver and said, “Hi, Mom.” Ironic, too, since both of Justin’s parents had been killed in an auto accident, leaving him an orphan at the tender age of twelve, shipped off to live in New York with his aging Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Burt, who were now gone a good nine years themselves. Maybe there was something of the yearning I knew he still felt for his parents injected in the smile he projected from the small screen once he picked up that telephone. Whatever it was, the commercial ran so often—it even made Superbowl Sunday slots—that Justin was still coasting on the pile of residuals money he’d racked up. Perhaps that was making it harder and harder for him to get out of bed for the odd production job that came his way.