Engaging Men

I sighed, knowing what was coming. Because if there was one thing Kirk and I had down pat by now, it was sex. Like the scientist that he was, he had experimented endlessly on me to discover just what buttons to push to get me where I wanted to go. And it was never boring, despite this precision on his part, I thought, as he rolled me beneath him, did away with both of our boxers, then rested back on his heels momentarily to cover himself in latex procured from its ever-ready place in the nightstand.

I would have hated myself for being such putty in his hands, if it weren’t for the heat that inevitably overcame me as he slid inside me. My only complaint might have been that Kirk wasn’t much of a kisser during sex. In fact, he rarely brought his mouth to mine once we were joined. But that was okay, I thought, gazing up at his flushed features, his dark lashes against his cheeks, his full mouth. The view was pretty damn good from here.

Rather than revel in the view as I usually did, I closed my eyes. And just as I was settling into the rhythm, a sudden—and unexpected—image filled my mind of Kirk peeling away my clothes, lifting me into his arms and depositing me on a canopied bed I had never seen before in my life. And when, in my mind’s eye, I turned to look at the heap of cloth that had pooled at my feet as Kirk freed the last button on my— T-shirt?—I saw, to my horrified surprise, swaths and swaths of white silk. What looked to be, in my heated imagination a wedding gown?

Oh, God, I thought, as my body contracted—almost unwillingly, for it seemed way too soon—and I felt the biggest climax of my life shudder through me. My eyes flew open as the foreign sound of an earth-shattering moan left my mouth. I might even have thought it was Kirk who had cried out so freely because, unlike me, he made no bones about noisily expressing his pleasure, if I hadn’t found myself looking straight into his surprised gaze. Moments later, I felt and heard his own satisfied shudder as his body went lax on mine.

“Wow,” he said, when he lifted his head and met my gaze once more. “That was something,” he continued, a smile lighting his features as he bent to graze my surprised mouth with a kiss.

“Yeah,” I said breathlessly, studying his expression. It was something, I thought, hope beating in my breast. But did it mean something? I wondered, remembering the image of that dress in all its surprising detail. Well, clearly it did mean something, as sex between Kirk and me had always been a revelation. But this felt like a revelation of a very different kind. For me, at least, I thought, gazing into his eyes and seeking out the foreign emotions that I felt racking my own heart and mind.

I did see something shining in Kirk’s eyes, but what it was had yet to be determined. Until I heard his next words.

“I never felt you so…strongly. That must have been a big O, huh?” he said with a laugh, then leaned back with a look that told me exactly what he was feeling. Pride. The garden-variety male smugness over a sexual performance well done.

As if to punctuate my realization, he went into scientist mode once more. “What do you think it was? I mean, it was the fucking missionary position, for chrissakes. Nothing special there.” He pulled his hand away from my waist, where it had been gently massaging me, and thumped the bed. “Maybe it was this new mattress? God, had I known, I would have tipped that salesman at Sleepy’s.”

Oh brother.

I might have been thoroughly disgusted at this point, if Kirk hadn’t rolled onto his back, bringing me with him, and pulled me into that solid body of his. Maybe it was the feel of his muscled chest beneath me. Or the tenderness in his hands as they slid over my back. Maybe I just wanted to believe that, though Kirk was a guy and thus given to fits of euphoria over the technicalities of sex, he did feel something more—something he couldn’t possibly express—that made me relent, pressing my body into his in an attempt to hold on to whatever that feeling was. At least until reality set in. And it soon did.

Glancing at the clock, Kirk sat up, suddenly disentangling himself from my limbs. “Is it ten already? I gotta pack.”

“Pack?” I asked, cool air crawling over me as he leaped from the bed, pulled on a pair of boxers and headed for the closet.

“Damn, did I forget to tell you?” He turned to look at me, his expression baffled, as if he were mentally going over one of his meticulous to-do lists and realizing he’d forgotten one of the most important items on it: me.

Assuming he was going away to meet a client, I prepared to launch into a speech about how nice it would be to know these things in advance. Then I heard his next words.

“I’m going home this weekend.”

That stopped me short. Kirk was going home to Newton, Massachusetts. To visit his parents. Parents, I might add, I had yet to lay eyes on myself.

“When did you decide this?” I asked, a vague panic beginning to invade my rattled senses.

“Mmm…last week? Anyway, I just booked the ticket this morning. I was going to tell you….”

His voice faded away as my mind skittered over the facts: Kirk was going home for one of his semiannual trips, and he hadn’t invited me. Again. The memory of Josh’s taunting voice on my answering machine ran through my frazzled brain. While I was orgasming over wedding dresses, Kirk was planning a pilgrimage to the parental abode without me. Clearly I was not the woman who was about to pull the lid off this thing with Kirk. In fact, given that I was oh-for-three when you tallied up the number of times Kirk had gone home in the past year and a half and not invited me, it might even seem like his lid was still airtight.

Since I didn’t know how to broach the subject of a meet-the-parents visit, I addressed the more immediate problem: “I wish you’d told me sooner…” So I might have had a chance to rally for position of serious girlfriend, I thought but didn’t say.

“I’m sorry, Noodles,” he replied, contrite. “You know how busy I’ve been with this new client. Did I tell you that I’m designing a program for Norwood Investments? They have offices all over the country. If I land Norwood, I could have work lined up for the next few years….”

His words silenced me for the moment. Maybe it was the injection of the nickname he had given me during the early days of our relationship, when I had ventured to cook him pasta, which, all-American boy that he is, he referred to as noodles and sauce. After I had teasingly told him that my Italian mother would toss him out on his ear if he ever referred to her pasta as “noodles,” he had affectionately given me the name instead. But his warm little endearment wasn’t the only thing that shut me up. There was also his subtle reminder that he was a software designer on the rise. That the program he had created six months earlier to automate office space was the only thing on his mind, now that prestigious financial companies like Norwood Investments had taken notice. In the face of all this ambition, I somehow felt powerless to express my desire to be considered parent-worthy in Kirk’s mind.

“Hey, Noodles?” Kirk said now, pulling a pair of jeans over his boxers and donning a T-shirt. “I’m gonna run down to Duane Reade and pick up a few things for my trip. Need anything?”

Yeah, I thought: my head examined. “Um, no, I’m all right,” I replied cautiously.

“Okay, I’ll be back in fifteen, then.” He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the forehead before making his way out the front door.

The minute I heard the door slam behind him, I picked up the phone. I needed another perspective. Specifically: an ex-boyfriend’s perspective. And since pride prevented me from calling back the newly engaged Josh just yet, I dialed up Randy, whose number I still had safely tucked in my memory banks. After all, not marrying the men in your life did have its advantages. I had managed to turn at least two of my ex-boyfriends into friends.

“I didn’t think you were into all that,” Randy said, after we’d exchanged greetings and I’d inquired about why the marriage issue had never come up for us.

“Into all what?” I asked.

“You know, marriage, kids. Hey, did I tell you Cheryl and I are working on our first?”

“That’s wonderful,” I said in a daze. “What exactly do you mean I’m not into marriage, kids?”

Randy chuckled. “C’mon, Ange, you know as well as I do that your career came first. You always wanted to be the big movie star.”

“Actor. I am an actor.”

“Whatever.”

When I hung up a short while later, I began to wonder if maybe I was projecting the wrong image. True, I had long been harboring the dream of making a career of the acting talent I had been lavishly praised for all through high school and college. And though I hadn’t exactly landed my dream role in the four years since I had left a steady job in sales to pursue acting, Rise and Shine counted for something, didn’t it?

Suddenly I had to start getting realistic, if I hoped to ever get a grip on this particular lid. I was thirty-one years old. I wasn’t getting any younger, as my mother lost no opportunity of reminding me. I needed to start looking like a wife.

2

I’m not really a wife, but I play one on TV.

When I arrived home after the show the next morning and discovered Justin trying to tug a sofa through the narrow entrance foyer of our apartment, I realized that even if I didn’t look like a wife, I was quite capable of sounding like one. Big time.

“What on earth are you doing?” I cried, though I knew exactly what he was up to. Collecting other people’s castoffs. For as lovable as Justin was, he had the single worst trait you could have in a roommate: He was a pack rat.

“Hey,” he said, glancing up at me from where he stood, bent over his latest find: a turquoise-green sofa that had clearly seen better days. “Can you believe someone left this for garbage?”

Uh, yeah, I thought, studying the yellow floral trim and sunken seat cushions with renewed horror.

“It was right out front, too.”

I felt a groan rising up. A threadbare couch, circa 1975, right in front of the building. Clearly there was no way Justin could have resisted. “Justin, we already have two couches.” One of which he had promised to get rid of after he dragged home his last couch acquisition. I realized once again why inheriting your Aunt Eleanor’s spacious, rent-stabilized two-bedroom could be a curse, at least in Justin’s case. In addition to the assorted furnishings Aunt Eleanor had left behind for her favorite nephew, Justin had acquired, among other things, four television sets, three VCRs, six file cabinets and a Weber outdoor grill that I assumed he was saving for some suppressed suburban dreamhouse with a garage big enough to store Yankee Stadium, should any future mayor carry out Rudy Giuliani’s threat to tear down the current home of the Bronx Bombers. For surely if that day ever did come, Justin would feel compelled to save some part of it. In his warped little mind, Justin didn’t think he was collecting junk so much as rescuing it.

“Ange, you think you could give me a hand with this?” he said.

I sighed, realizing I would have to give in for the moment, trapped as I was in the hallway until my roommate’s monstrous new acquisition was moved.

“How did you get this up here anyway?” I asked. Though Justin was well muscled for a lanky guy, I somehow couldn’t picture him maneuvering a three-hundred-pound sofa up the two long flights to our apartment.

“David in three-B gave me a hand. And he said he had some old lamps if we were interested—”

Ack! “Justin, honey, we need to talk….” I began gently, trying to not completely douse the delighted gleam in his eyes. But just as I was about to launch into a speech about the dangers of recycling, the phone rang.

“Can you…?” I asked, gesturing toward the couch that stood between me and the rest of the apartment.

I slumped against the doorway as Justin grabbed the receiver. “Hello,” he sang into the phone, in his usual chipper voice. “Hey, Mrs. Di, how are you?”

My mother. I sat down on the edge of the sofa and waited while Justin practiced his usual charm on her. I sometimes think she called to talk to him, judging by the giddiness that was ever present in her voice whenever Justin finally handed over the phone. That was just Justin’s way, I supposed. Even I had been charmed by him from the moment we had met in an improv class four years earlier. At the time, we were both just starting out in acting, Justin having given up a career behind the camera when the feature-length film he’d directed won a lot of buzz on the festival circuit and a prestigious award but ultimately no distributor. He claimed that he wanted to expand his horizons now that he had realized just how hard it was to get a movie out there. I wondered at that, since it seemed to me that it was just as hard to get yourself out there as an actor. But Justin seemed happy enough to take a union job as a grip for a production company based out of Long Island City, which gave him the kind of flexibility he needed to pursue acting.

Our improv teacher had paired us together, me being the only student without a partner when Justin straggled in, even later to class than I had been. I was a bit scared of working with Justin, who, with his dark blond hair, green eyes and tall good looks, was just the kind of babe I avoided. After all, a good-looking man—and an actor to boot—was bound to be cocky. So you can just imagine how I felt when the instructor led us in our first theater game, which required me to stand with my back to Justin and allow myself to fall straight back into his arms. “To build trust,” the instructor had explained. And build trust it did. From the moment I felt Justin’s firm grip beneath me after those first spine-tingling moments in midair, I knew instinctively he would always be there for me. In the years that followed, he had been. Like when my old roommate threw me out of our apartment two years ago to make room for her new live-in boyfriend. Justin had opened his two-bedroom to me without batting an eye, though my mother had batted hers a bit about my having a male roommate. She got over that right after I dragged Justin home for dinner and he easily won her over. Justin and I have been living together ever since.

“This Sunday?” I heard Justin say now, “Oh, Mrs. Di, you’re torturing me. You know I’d never turn down your manicotti, but Lauren’s coming to town.”

Lauren was Justin’s girlfriend, of the past three years, though their cumulative time spent together was probably more like three months. Lauren was a stage actress who always found herself in some leading role or another, but, somehow, never in New York. Currently she was doing Ibsen in, of all places, South Florida.

“Yep, gotta do the girlfriend thing this weekend,” Justin continued with a chuckle. “But Angela’s not doing anything, as far as I know. Hang on a second, sweetie, I’ll let you talk to her. You take care, Mrs. Di,” he finished cheerfully, handing me the receiver now that he’d managed to sew up my Sunday plans.

“Hi, Ma,” I said, sliding awkwardly from the arm of the sofa onto the seat cushion and sending a poof of dust into the air.

“Angela!” my mother shouted in my ear, as if surprised to hear my voice. I honestly believe she thought it was a miracle I wasn’t gunned down on a daily basis, living as I did off of Avenue A. The only thing Ma knew about Alphabet City was the bloody battles featured in the movie of the same name, which my brother Sonny had deemed it necessary to show her, just days after I had moved in with Justin.

“What’s up, Ma? How’s Nonnie?” Nonnie is my grandmother, who lives on the lower level of my mother’s house in Brooklyn, which is as good as living with my mother, judging by the amount of time she spends in my mother’s kitchen.

“Nonnie’s fine. In fact, she’s looking forward to seeing you this Sunday for dinner. Sonny and Vanessa are going to be there!” my mother informed me, as if my arrogant brother Sonny and his obscenely pregnant wife were some kind of enticement.

I gave a silent inner groan. Once Ma got it in her head that her family was coming together for Sunday dinner, there was no excuse, short of emergency brain surgery, that could get me out of going. “Family comes first,” she was fond of saying to me and my brothers. And I knew she was right. Only it made it difficult sometimes to compete in New York City, where it often seemed as if no one had parents at all.

“You’re bringing Kirk, right?”

“Um, he’s going out of town for the weekend,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?”

I could tell by the impressed tone of her voice that she assumed it was on business. And since Kirk did make semifrequent trips to see clients, I decided not to burst her bubble just yet. After all, Kirk had met my family before. Hell, he was practically an honorary member. The creep.

“Listen, Ma, I gotta go. Justin brought home this…couch,” I said, glancing down at the worn fabric once more, “and we need to move it out of the hall.”

“A couch? I thought you just got a couch.”

“We did. Justin is starting a collection.”

She laughed, as if anything Justin did was perfectly delightful. And as I clicked off the phone and glanced over at the cradle across the room, which there was no way in hell I could reach with this monstrosity in the way, I decided to summon my perfectly delightful roommate, who had since disappeared into his bedroom, probably to watch the Yankees game.

“JUSTIN!” I bellowed loud enough for the whole floor to hear.

“What’s up?” he said, popping his head out of the bedroom, a puzzled frown on his face. As if I were disturbing him.

“What do you mean, what’s up?” I said, slapping my hand on the couch and sending another load of dust into the air.

“Sheesh, I didn’t realize that couch was so dirty,” he said to my chorus of sneezes.

“Apparently there are a lot of things you don’t realize,” I said in frustration. “Like that we already have two couches. Like that I have to schlep out to Brooklyn Sunday night and still be up at five on Monday—”

“But you never go to bed any earlier than midnight. Even when you’re home.”

“That’s not the point!” I shouted.

Startled, Justin simply stared at me. “What is the point, then?”

“The point is…the point is…” My throat seized, and suddenly I burst out with, “Kirk is going to see his family this weekend.”

“So why didn’t you tell your mother that you’re going with him?”

“Because I’m not going with him.”

“Oh,” he replied, and I could tell by his confused expression that he still wasn’t getting it.

“He didn’t ask me to go.”

“Oh,” he said, his tone implying that it all made sense to him now.

“Shouldn’t he have asked me to go?” I asked, clutching the phone receiver in my lap.

Justin seemed to consider this for a moment. “Did you want to go?”

I sighed. “That’s not the point.” Maybe men were thicker than I realized. “The point is, we have been dating almost two years and I have yet to meet his parents, despite the fact that he has been to my mother’s house in Brooklyn more times than I can count.”

“Brooklyn is a lot closer than—where’s he from again? Brookline?”

I sighed. “Newton. But the point is, he doesn’t take me seriously. Not seriously enough to introduce me to his parents. Or to…to marry me.”

Justin visibly blanched at this. “Marry you?” he said, as if the word caused a bitter taste in his mouth. What is it with men and the M word anyway?

“Yes, marry me,” I replied. “Why is it so hard to believe that Kirk would want to marry me? After all, I’ve been sleeping with him, eating with him, sharing some of my most intimate thoughts with him, for a year and eight months. Don’t you think it’s time we made some kind of commitment?”

“We eat and sleep together,” Justin said, a smile tugging at his lips, “and we’re not getting married.” Then he paused, glancing over at me with a glint of amusement in his eye. “Are we?”

“Forget it,” I said, realizing that as lovable as Justin was, he would never understand. He was, after all, a guy. And I knew about guys. I had grown up in a family full of them. “Let’s just find a place for this couch,” I said, wondering where we were going to put it until I convinced Justin of its utter worthlessness. Then I thought of Kirk’s clutter-free one-bedroom and realized there were other reasons to get married besides love. Like real estate.

I decided to take my problem to the Committee. The Committee, so named because of their unfailing ability to have an opinion about everything and everyone, consisted of the three women who filled out the other three corners of the office cubicle I shared four times a week, answering the demands of the discerning customers who shopped the Lee and Laurie, a catalog company claiming to be the purveyor of effortlessly casual style. Though I was grateful to Michelle for hooking me up with the job when I decided to give up my nine-to-five gig as a sales rep in the garment district for the actor’s life, I had learned in my short career at Lee and Laurie that there is nothing casual—to me, anyway—about paying seventy-five dollars for a T-shirt designed to look unassuming enough to, say, take out the garbage in. Still, it was a job that suited my actor’s lifestyle, with convenient three-to-ten-o’clock shifts and, believe it or not, health insurance. Lots of it. It was the just the kind of thing a girl with dreams and chronic postnasal drip craves.

It was also the mecca for the wife, judging by the number of Comfortably Marrieds who flocked to Lee and Laurie’s employ, hoping to earn some extra income once their kids were old enough to become latch-key.

Hence my decision to go to the Committee, which was composed of Michelle Delgrosso, who seemingly only worked at Lee and Laurie to be able to indulge herself in the expensive lip gloss and overpriced trims designed to keep her dark, layered shoulder-length hair smooth, shiny and enviable; Roberta Simmons, a forty-something married mother of two perfect children, and Doreen Sikorsky, who was a bit of a wild card, with an alleged divorce in her past and enough conspiracy theories to make me wary of most of the things she said.

“Hey,” I said in greeting as I approached our four-seater cubicle, which was currently occupied only by Michelle and Doreen. And since Doreen was on a call, I was glad to have Michelle’s ear. After all, Michelle was the epitome of everything my mother deemed good in this world. Brooklyn born. Married at twenty-three years old. And the owner of a three-bedroom house in Marine Park.

“Where’s Roberta?” I asked, realizing I might need a better balance of opinion. Roberta’s life was a little closer to what I aspired to, if only because she lived in Manhattan.

“She’s in the can, as usual,” Michelle said with a small smile. “I swear I don’t know what that woman eats.”

“We can’t all be bulimic, Michelle,” Doreen said, having finished her call just in time to tune in to the conversation. “Hey, DiFranco, how’s it hanging?”

I sighed. These were the kind of people you worked with when you accepted $15.50 an hour as your starting salary. Maybe I should just keep my dilemma to myself….

But then Roberta showed up, looking like her usual sane and steadying self. Maybe it was the short haircut—women with short hair always seemed smart and responsible—that framed her soft, elfin features and wide blue eyes. Or maybe it was the expensive camel trousers and well-cut black tee, compliments of the employee discount Lee and Laurie gave its devoted staff. “Hey, Angie,” she said, sitting herself down and putting her headset back on.

“Hey, Roberta,” I said, adjusting my own headset over my ears. But just as I was about to launch into my dilemma, the familiar long beep sounded in my ear, indicating that my first phone call was coming over the line. Suppressing a sigh, I launched into the introductory script that had been drilled into us during training, “Thank you for calling Lee and Laurie Catalog, where casual comes easy. This is Angela. How can I help you today?”