Engaging Men (4 page)

“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 hom.e 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/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 worthless-ness.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?”

Fortunately, I had a quick and easy call from a woman who thought the new boat-neck tee looked so clean and comfortable on the blond goddess who modeled it on page 74 that she deemed it necessary to order it in every color. Once I had inputted all the information into my computer, thanked her for her order and hit the call end button on my phone set, I swiveled around to face my cube-mates once more.