Engaging Men (11 page)

“So what do you say to a little celebratory dinner Monday night?”

“Monday night?” I replied, realizing that, as usual, I had nothing planned other than the usual takeout-and-a-rental with Kirk. “What time?”

“Around eight?”

“That’s fine,” I said, resigned to my fate.

“Looking forward to it, Ange.”

“Yeah, uh, me, too,” I replied, hanging up the phone feeling something like dread.

But a quick glance at Kirk’s expression revived me immediately. Judging by the scowl that now creased his handsome brow, he was jealous. Jealous!

“What the hell was that about?”

Very jealous, obviously.

“Oh, nothing.” I waved a hand nonchalantly and burrowed in beside him again to watch TV “That was Josh. You remember Josh, right?”

They had met over a year ago. I had been playing Miss Julie in an off-off-Broadway production of the play of the same name, back in the days when I believed playing obscure characters in even more obscure venues would actually get me somewhere. Though by that time Josh had given up all pretensions of having an acting career himself, he still came to see me whenever I managed to land something juicier than, say, a crowd scene in a Christmas show. Josh had been dating Emily at the time, though he hadn’t brought her for one reason or another—I suspected because it had been too soon in their budding relationship to introduce her to the ex-girlfriend. I had introduced him to Kirk as merely “a friend,” though months later, during one of those relationship talks in which you ‘fess up to your past, I did let it drop that Josh and I had dated. At the time, Kirk took it in stride, but now that my ex-boyfriend had given me a midnight call, it seemed the playing field had changed…

“What did he want?”

“Oh, he wants to have dinner Monday night.” See? Not a lie.

“Don’t we usually hang out on Monday?”

“Oh, did we have plans?” I asked innocently.

That was the crux of the problem with relationships. Those presumed dates. Just because I often hung out with Kirk on Monday night, I suppose he had the right to assume I would continue to do so without any sort of prior confirmation. But, if I was practically living at Kirk’s place four out of seven days a week, didn’t I have a right to presume we would one day make that seven out of seven days? No, I was not allowed that presumption. And, therefore, Kirk would no longer be allowed his. “So you’re going out to dinner with your ex-boyfriend,” Kirk said, his gray eyes wide with disbelief.

“Oh, I don’t think of Josh that way,” I said. “We’re just friends,” I added. “Very close friends.”

And then, before a smile of satisfaction threatened to blow my cover, I rested my cheek on Kirk’s bare chest, presumably to settle in to television once more.

But who was I kidding? My heart was racing out of my chest with the thrill of victory. Kirk was jealous! That had to mean something, didn’t it?

What it ultimately meant was that I had to surfer through an evening with Josh. Not that he wasn’t a good friend—he was. Or he used to be, pre-Emily. I just preferred him over the phone or via e-mail. I think it was because I could…manage him better.

“Hey, Angie, how are you?” he said as I approached him where he stood outside of Holy Basil, a Thai restaurant in the East Village we had agreed upon after much debate. Josh always tried to coerce me to go the Upper East Side, where he now co-habitated with Emily. But, truthfully, the only time I ventured higher than midtown was to see Grace, who lived on the Upper West Side.

Despite what I knew about his flossing habits, Josh looked spectacularly well-groomed in a navy pinstripe suit, hot-pink tie (this, I suppose, was his attempt to show that despite his dreary nine-to-five life, he still had a wild side) and wire-rimmed glasses.

We hugged hello. Actually, Josh hugged, while I went for a quick kiss on the cheek. The end result was that I wound up kissing his neck. I stifled a groan. Somehow, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, I always did something to convince Josh I still “wanted” him. This was what happened when you broke up with a guy before he got a chance to break up with you, even though it was evident to both of you the relationship was over.

When he leaned back from the embrace, Josh stood staring at me in a pose that looked surprisingly like his head shot: chin down (drawing attention to his dimpled cleft), blue eyes forward, a slight smile lingering on his well-shaped mouth.YesJosh was a good-looking guy.The problem was, he seemed to need constant affirmation of that fact—especially now that he wasn’t acting anymore and having agents and directors tell him that he had the kind of look that could sell anything from toothpaste to hair-replacement products (did I mention that thick mass of dark, wavy hair?). Hence, the reason he had always gotten great commercial work. He had the kind of face that made him just good-looking enough to make you covet whatever skin-care system or toothpaste he was touting, and unassuming enough for you to believe he actually used it.

I decided to throw him a bone. After all, we were friends. And I understood that particular anxiety (heightened in actors, who base their work on their looks) that drove lesser people to face tucks and chin lifts.

“You look great,” I said, smiling up at him and, I’ll admit, waiting for some confirmation that I, too, was flourishing enough to consider giving up my day job.

“You let your hair go curly,” he said, his eyes roaming over my hair, which I suddenly realized was sticking to the back of my neck in the heat.This was not a compliment from Josh, who used to tell me (with great regularity) during our grand-albeit-brief romance that I should have my hair straightened.

“Yeah, well. Summer. Humidity. Can’t fight nature forever,” I said, smoothing my hands over one of the shorter layers that usually framed my face but were now, I was sure, flying frightfully away from it.

Once we were settled at a cozy little table for two in the dimly lit restaurant, Josh became Josh again. The goofy little numbers cruncher who was trying so hard to seem like he was anything but the insurance actuary he was.

“So Emily and I went to see The Yearning Saturday night,” Josh began, naming a play I had seen over a year ago, back in the days when it was playing at an avant-garde theater and people like Emily Fairbanks didn’t know of its existence. After all, what interest would Emily Fairbanks, prep school girl from Connecticut, have in Lower East Side residents battling AIDS (because that’s what TlieYearning was about), unless she was paying eighty-five dollars a ticket? I guess at those prices, even Emily could afford to be sympathetic.

“Whose idea was that?” I asked, suspicious. In fact, I had been suspicious of Josh from the moment I had seen him in front of the restaurant, wearing what looked like a Brooks Brothers suit. This from the man who could never justify buying popcorn at the movies, no matter how tempting the smell (“Five dollars for corn?”) Invariably, I would buy my own, which he would guiltily eat. At the time, I accepted his frugality. Even admired it.We were both actors then, and of the mind-set that we could do without expensive frivolities for the sake of art. But ever since Josh had gotten a day job—and a princess, because that was what Emily appeared to be—he’d changed.

“Emily got comp tickets from her boss,” he replied with a certain smugness, as if his future wife’s skill at attaining freebies was to be admired. Apparently, Emily didn’t even have to pay for her kinder, gentler feelings.

“Yeah, well, I saw it already at LaMama,” I said, battling back with my superior I knew-it-was-great-art-even-then attitude.

But this didn’t faze Josh, who had an uncanny ability to lay me bare and bleeding with one well-put question. “So how’s the auditioning going?”

And there it was, the truth of just how far I wasn’t from Josh’s own bourgeois world. I hadn’t auditioned in months. Six, to be precise. Ever since I had landed my gig as exercise guru to the six-year-old set. But in the face of Josh’s inquiry, my career at Rise and Shine took on epic proportions. “Haven’t really had a chance,” I began, “what with the show being so successful and all. My producer has us rehearsing new routines already, so we can start up the new season as soon as the old one ends. And then there’s work and Kirk…“

He bobbed his head, as if this answer made sense to him. Then, with the apparent wisdom of a man who had spent all of one year pursuing his alleged lifelong dream, he said, “Yeah, I remember that life well. Always running around. Never sure where your next paycheck or your next meal was coming from. You know, I just read a report the other day that something like sixty-nine percent of all people working in creative fields die of causes that could have been treated during routine healthcare…”

And there you had it: my “attraction” for Josh. We had met over an antihistamine on the Great Lawn of Central Park while playing disinterested bystanders in a student film that we hoped might make it to Sundance, but that ultimately wound up on the cutting-room floor. After six hours of waiting for the two leads to get through a breakup scene on the blanket before us, my allergies had gone into overdrive. Josh, a fellow sufferer, had recognized the symptoms right away, and during the break slipped me a Claritin. Afterward we had shared coffee and the kind of conversation that could convince a woman she had found her destiny, or at least a man she could fearlessly fall apart in front of. We had a lot in common: the same allergies (pollen, dust mites, cats and certain varieties of nuts); the same neuroses (death, poverty and the imminent collapse of the retaining wall that kept the Hudson from flooding the F train) and the same fear that all our waiting around at open calls and suffering through rejection would ultimately result in nothing.

You would think that since he’d given up the precarious life of an actor for the relative safety of life insurance, he would have calmed down, but no. Now that he had succumbed to a career of creating tables designed to measure such things as death due to, say, consumption of common household products, Josh was a font of horrifying statistics. And though I knew better, I could not, somehow, keep from waiting with rapt attention for some morbid little tidbit to drop from his lips. It was as if I needed him around to remind me that even if there were things in life I couldn’t be sure of (my acting career, Kirk, the number of sofas in my apartment at any given time), I could be sure of one thing: the fact that I would die.