Engaging Men (45 page)

Her words made me even sadder. “But there must be some men out there you can count on.” Suddenly Drew entered my mind, and though I knew Grace would be none too happy to hear me invoke his name, I had to know why she had given up the one man who seemed like someone she could count on.

“What about Drew, Grace? I know you haven’t wanted to talk about him, but I need to understand why you gave him up when he seemed so devoted to you?“

“Yeah, he was devoted. But not devoted to me—only to the idea of me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he didn’t want to deal with who I really am,A nge.”

“How do you know that, Grace? If I know you, you probably didn’t let him in.”

“Oh, I let him in, all right. I told you about it—how I let Drew know about my biological mother.”

“But you said he didn’t care.”

“He did care, Ange. More than I realized.” She sighed, and I saw she was ready to give in and tell me everything she had been holding back about her breakup. “I know I didn’t want to admit it—even to you—but things were getting serious with Drew. Right after we went to see his boss’s new house in Westport, he started talking about marriage and…and babies. And I started thinking that’s what I wanted, too, you know? But I couldn’t commit to it—couldn’t have children—without knowing about my own mother.”

My heart started to beat faster. Grace had finally contacted her mother! I felt a fleeting sadness that she hadn’t turned to me during what was probably the scariest thing she’d ever done, but that was so Grace. “What was she like?” I asked now. “I mean, did you meet with her? Talk with her on the phone?”

“Well, no,” she replied. “I mean, I was going to, but I was scared, you know? So I talked to Drew about it one night, and if you think I was freaked, he was even more. He thought I should just forget about her. He was…afraid, Angie. Afraid she might be someone he didn’t want to know. A gold digger. Or a tramp. And then he starts looking at me like maybe I’m someone he might not want to know—”

Her voice broke, and I saw that her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. “I think after I first told him about her, he thought we could just sweep it under the carpet and carry on. He only wanted to know what he saw on the surface: Grace Noonan, daughter of a retired professor and a music teacher. He didn’t want to go…deeper. He didn’t want to know me. But I had to know.”

“So did you contact her?”

She looked at me then, and I saw a paralyzing fear in her eyes. “Well, no. I mean, I couldn’t after…after that. I mean, what if he’s right, Ange, what if she’s someone I don’t want to know? Or what if she doesn’t want to know me?”

It was then that she broke, tears streaming down her face uncontrollably, which was something for Grace. I had never, in all my life, seen her cry the way she was sobbing now. It scared me. And filled me with a sadness so deep I wanted to cry myself. I wish I had known she was in such pain. I wish I could have done something.

I could do something now, I thought, taking Grace in my arms and holding her until she had cried out everything she had in her. I’m not sure how long we sat there that way, but when she finally looked up again, she smiled. “Well, what a pair we are. I think it’s going to take a case of Roxanne Dubrow eye cream to get the puffiness out of our eyes.”

I smiled back. “Lucky for us, you probably have a case of it in that medicine cabinet of yours.”

“Yeah, that I do,” she said, then she sighed, staring around her pretty apartment as if nothing in that room could ever make her happy again.

“Grade, I know you don’t want to hear it right now. But I think you need to contact your mother for yourself. You need to know. Don’t,” I said, raising a hand as she opened her mouth to argue. “Just listen to me—it’s the only way you’re going to get past this pain. It’s the only way you’re going to heal.”

The fight drained out of her, and she looked down at her hands, which she’d clasped in her lap. “I’ll think about it, okay? But that’s all I’m promising.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” I said. “For now.” Then I smiled at her again. “Well, that and another cocktail. Now where are you hiding the Bacardi O? I think we both could use another drink…”

So we drank cosmopolitans and talked late into the night, just as we had done when we were teenagers—only then we were without the Bacardi O. I even prodded Grace into telling me about her escapades with Bad Billy, who, she told me, had disappeared again from her life, as expected.

“That’s one thing good about Billy. At least I know going in I can’t count on him,” she said with a weary smile as we pulled her convertible sofa into a bed for me to sleep on.

“You always have me, Gracie,” I said, looking at her once the last sheet had been laid on the bed. “You know that, right?”

“I know, I know,” she said, standing up from where she had been smoothing the sheet and meeting my gaze. “Best buds, right?”

“Always.”

In the days that followed, I was there for Grace. Literally. I had taken up residence on her sofa bed, and we spent a lot of late nights just sitting up and talking like we used to. Going shopping. (Yes, I shopped. What? A girl needs a few splurges to get herself through, right?) We even did a day of beauty at a spa near Grace’s apartment. Well, I only got a facial—Grace went for the full package, and would have bought it for me, too, if I’d let her. Between her treatments, we lounged about in the (complimentary) whirlpool, talking about everything from high school boyfriends to first New York apartments (yes, Grace had had to suffer through roommates at one time, too, but of course none others had managed to break her heart). Getting Grace to talk about her heartbreaks—or her fears about taking that next step and contacting her mother—was a bit more difficult. In fact, all this togetherness was getting to her, I think. She was so fiercely independent, it was hard for her to be around someone who forced her to probe her inner psyche on a daily basis.

But I wasn’t going to let up. I knew she needed someone. Maybe even someone other than me. “Grace, maybe you should go see your parents,” I said, when we found ourselves up late again one night and Grace, in her usual fashion, had just brushed off my careful suggestion that she needed to get herself out of the emotional rut she was in. I knew her adoptive parents had always supported her decision to find her mother. They’d supported Grace in everything she did, even during those rebellious teenage years. They loved her, and I knew she needed to be around them, if only to be reminded of that fact.

“My parents aren’t living nearby on Long Island anymore.

They moved to New Mexico—remember? The big retirement? The dream house in the desert?“

“So take some vacation—go visit them,” I urged. “You must have some time coming to you.”

Finally she gave in, whether because she was trying to get away from me, with my menacing questions about her emotional life, or because she finally understood that she did need to be in the soothing embrace of the people who loved and raised her. She booked a flight a few days later.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me, the night before she left, her bag packed and waiting by the door.

“I’m going to go back to my life.”

Before Grace did finally leave, she assured me that I could stay with her as long as I wanted to. But I knew I couldn’t stay there much longer. I had to do something to move myself forward.

And I had a few sofas—and a roommate—to face.

Because I had decided, in that week I had spent at Grace’s, that if I couldn’t be there for Justin as a lover, I still had to support him no matter what insane choices he made. Maybe it was all those voice mails he had left me on my cell phone, telling me my mother had called or that he’d read about a casting call in Backstage that he thought would be perfect for me.

I knew he was trying hard to be what he had always been to me. A friend.

So I had to try, too.

The moment I stepped through the apartment door, I knew he wasn’t there. It was too…quiet. And the feeling that pervaded the place was that same loneliness I felt whenever Justin wasn’t filling the rooms with his presence. But when I entered the living room, I realized he had filled that space with something. A tattered but pretty wingback chair now sat beside sofa #3. And what looked like a bird cage (sans bird, of course) sat on one of the end tables. Then there was the microwave I saw when I peeked into the kitchen (still hopeful that Justin might be in the apartment somewhere) stacked right on top of the one we already owned. I almost laughed. Clearly he had missed me, judging by the number of acquisitions he had made while I was gone, maybe in some vain attempt to fill up the emptiness I had left in my wake.

Suddenly I was looking forward to his coming home from wherever he had roamed. I needed to see him, to reaffirm that he was still the same Justin I knew and loved. That we could go back, somehow, to the friends we once were. I dropped my bag on sofa #3 and was just about to head into my bedroom when I noticed the windowsill was bare. Bernadette was gone.

And I knew that could only mean one thing: Justin was gone, too.

Knowing I couldn’t possibly stay in that familiar space alone, I grabbed the rest of my head shots, my resume and some more clothes, and went back to Grace’s. For as empty as her apartment felt without her in it, it wasn’t quite as unbearable as mine without Justin. Clearly he had gone on to start his new life without me—and even earlier than planned. And I knew I had to start mine.

I had a lot to do, too. Look for an apartment—because I knew now, there was no way I could live with Justin when he finally did come home from Vegas. Just the sight of the jeans he’d left tossed over a chair, his film collection overflowing the entertainment center, had brought me to tears as I gathered my things together. It was clear to me now that I had only myself to count on. That if I was going to make a commitment, it had to be to me.

So I called Viveca to check in, and she said she had some positive feedback on my audition for Lifetime, but no decision had been made yet. I figured that meant they had decided to audition a few hundred more actresses, each more talented and beautiful than the next. Still, the news that my audition had been well received lifted my spirits somewhat. Enough so I could call back my mother, whom I didn’t share my news with (I was, as usual, afraid to jinx myself). I did, however, promise to come to dinner that Sunday. Now I was glad I hadn’t told her about Justin. If she asked about him over dinner (and she usually did ask about him—even more so since I’d broken up with Kirk), I could just say he was fine and living in Las Vegas and she wouldn’t see it as anything more than another delightful new adventure for Justin, rather than the heartbreaking event it was for me. But that was okay. If I couldn’t be with Justin, I certainly didn’t need him to fall out of my mother’s good graces. I didn’t want to ever go home to Brooklyn and find his picture missing from the Sacred Heart. Since he had moved himself so far from all that he knew, all that he loved, he would need all the protection he could get.