Engaging Men (7 page)

“Who’s Kirk?” Tracy asked, completely forgetting the guy who had kept her giggling all afternoon with his silly little jokes the last time we were here.

“You idiot,”Timmy declared. “Kirk is Angela’s boyfriend.”

“I’m not an idiot, you’re an idiot,” she said, reaching behind me to yank her brother’s hair and sending my head jutting out neatly over my plate, giving my mother an easy aim as she set about taking it off.

“He home to see his parents,” my mother supplied, eyebrows raised as if inviting speculation about Kirk’s intentions.

“Oh,yeah?” Sonny said.“I didn’t think that guy had a home, judging by how often he eats with us.”

“Doesn’t his family live in Massachusetts somewhere?” Vanessa said, clearly proud of herself for remembering the details of my boyfriend’s life. For whatever you wanted to say about Vanessa, she really did make an effort when it came to family.

“Newton, Massachusetts,” I replied, leaning back and neatly frustrating Tracy’s effort to get a grip on her brother’s head in turn. With a glance at my mother, I continued in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact voice, “It’s about six hours by train.” Not that Kirk ever took the train. He had so many frequent flier miles, he could probably take us both on the shuttle out of La-Guardia without making a dent in his considerable savings account. The jerk. Still, I had an argument to win here. “So it’s not exactly a hop, skip and a jump from New York.”

“I didn’t say anything!” my mother protested, completely denying the subtext her raised eyebrows were sending everyone at the table.

And just in case anyone missed the subtext, Miranda innocently laid it out for all to see. “Have you ever met Kirk’s parents?”

As I stumbled toward an answer, my mother declared, “No, she hasn’t. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” Joey said, as if he weren’t following.

“I just think that if a man is serious about a girl…” my mother began.

“What? You thinking of marrying this guy?” Sonny said, as if marriage for his baby sister was an option he had yet to think of.

“I don’t know what I’m—” I began.

“Why shouldn’t she be thinking of it?” my mother chimed in. “She’s thirty-one years old.”

“Believe me, you’re better off waiting,” Miranda said. “I married Fred when I was twenty-five, and look where that got me,” she continued with the habitual roll of the eyes she made whenever she referred to her ex-husband.

My mother’s mouth dropped open, then she shut it soundly. But her expression, as it roamed over her prized firstborn son sitting next to his bride-to-be, said that she didn’t think Miranda had done too badly in the long run.

“Hey, Vanessa was only twenty-five when she married me. And you’re happy, baby, aren’t you?” Sonny said, turning to his wife, who scrunched up her nose and rubbed it against his, as her hand roamed over her ever-present abdomen. Somehow the sight of them made me feel… wistful. But only for a moment.

“Well, I was a young bride, too,” Nonnie said, “and all that made me was a young widow,” she continued, giving Artie a significant look. “But things are different today. Women today like to date around. Test-drive a man before they take him home for good.”

“What? I was wrong to marry my husband at twenty-two?” my mother said defensively. “We were in love. We wanted to be together.”

And there, I thought, lay the thing that stabbed most about Kirk’s weekend away. Did he even want to be with me? Really be with me?

“Tell you the truth,” Sonny said now,“I always liked that first guy you went out with. Vincent Salerno. Whatever happened to him?”

“Married,” my mother said, as if whatever point she was trying to make was already proved. “For over nine years now.”

“Whoa-ho,” Sonny said with a barely contained laugh. “Another one bites the dust. And didn’t you recently go to the wedding of that guy you went out with in college? What was his name? Randy?“

“That was five years ago already,” my mother said. Clearly she was a stickler for details tonight.

Oh, God, please don’t let them ask about Josh next…

But Sonny didn’t even need to ask about Josh to make his point.“Hey, you wait any longer, Ange, and all of the good ones will be taken,” he said.

“Not all of them,” Nonnie said, giving Artie a look that stopped his fork midway to his mouth.

Even my own grandmother was going to beat me to the altar, I realized now, judging by the blush that was crawling up Artie’s neck.

“Angela’s different,” Vanessa said in my defense. “She’s artistic, ” she declared, her thick Brooklyn accent making the word sound more like “autistic.”

“Hey, Angela, can you do that headstand for us again?” Tracy asked, remembering a Rise and Shine routine I once demonstrated for her in my mother’s living room.

“No headstands,”Joey said as Tracy began to scoot out of her chair. “You gotta eat first. Then Angela will do her tricks for you.”

Tricks? Oh, brother.

When had I gone from “artistic” to circus sideshow freak?

I sighed. Maybe there really was something wrong with me.

Here is only one thing worse than returning to an empty apartment on a Sunday night—that’s returning to an empty apartment littered with the remains of someone else’s good time. Specifically, Justin’s and—-judging by the two wineglasses nestled cozily together on the dining room table—Lauren’s. Apparently they’d come home early from the Hamptons. Candles littered the windowsill; the smell of burning wax was still in the air. A note left by the answering machine indicated in Justin’s loopy scrawl that he had taken Lauren to the airport. Which meant, since Justin didn’t have a car, that he was taking an expensive round-trip cab to LaGuardia, just so he could spend an extra hour with the woman he once described to me as “the best thing that ever happened” to him.

I sighed.When was /going to be anyone’s best thing?

As I headed into the living room and saw that sofa #3 had been maneuvered from its position in the middle of the room to a less prominent place in front of sofa #2, I realized I did have something to be thankful for. At least Lauren had used her considerable influence over Justin to persuade him that his most

recent sofa acquisition was atrocious enough to warrant a slipcover, which Lauren had no doubt created from one of Justin’s bedsheets, I deduced from the pale blue covering that now disguised sofa #3’s threadbare expanse. Since the two sofas faced the largest of our four TVs, their positioning created a movie-theater effect that satisfied my inner actor on some levels, despite the sacrifice of a good three feet of living space. I plopped down in the front row, grabbed the remote from the marble-topped coffee table (all the French provincial castoffs were Aunt Eleanor’s) and clicked on the TV, my eyes roaming to the clock on the far wall. Seven o’clock. Kirk’s flight landed at 7:50 (I saw the ticket on his dresser—not that I was checking). No luggage (Kirk always carried on), so he’d head straight for Ground Transportation. Give him five minutes to land a cab.Twenty minutes to the Midtown Tunnel.Ten minutes through the tunnel (after all, it was Sunday night, there was bound to be traffic). Kirk lived six minutes from the tunnel (he actually timed it once).That would put him in front of his building at precisely 8:31 p.m. Two minutes up the stairs, twenty minutes settle-in time (Kirk couldn’t relax until his bag was unpacked and his toiletries safely tucked away in his medicine cabinet once more. I found it cute at first. Annoying later, when I was waiting to hear from him after one of his frequent weekends away.) That took us to 8:53. By nine o’clock he would be on the phone, proclaiming how much he had missed me.

I only had to wait two hours for a reminder of why I had been in the relationship with Kirk for twenty months despite the fact that he hadn’t felt it necessary to bring me home with him.We loved each other, dammit. Had declared it so in month three. Reveled in it until month eight. Settled into things at the year mark. And now…now we sometimes took it (love, that is) and each other for granted. So what that he hadn’t asked me to come with him? It didn’t really mean anything in the face of all we had.Why, I bet if I just opened my mouth (because Grace always told me I was guilty of not communicating what I wanted) and told him how much it would mean to me to go home with him next time around, he’d happily invite me along. In fact, he might regret he hadn’t brought me along this time.

He might even want to schedule a trip home within weeks just to make up for it!

And so, with this soothing thought I settled in to watch a round of mindless TV, starting with a rerun of Friends, which seemed to be on six times a day now that it had gone into syndication. I studied Jennifer Aniston with renewed interest, imagining this cheerful blond goddess settling in at home with her golden-blond god, Brad. Surely there was something to Michelle’s tight-lid theory if this woman who had had trouble attracting the attention of David Schwimmer in her fictional life had landed Brad Pitt in reality.

So much for my reality, I mused, quickly changing channels once Rachel et al’s coffee-shop existence was wrapped up with a rousing laugh track. One hour to go, I thought, with another glance at the clock. I spent it watching a news program on the deadly bacteria that resides in common household objects.And just as I was absorbing the fact that I had greater things to worry about than whether or not I will one day marry (like that I will certainly one day die), I realized it was just about nine and anticipation warmed me, reminding me that I was at the moment very, very much alive.

I jumped off the couch and headed for my bedroom to throw on a pair of boxers and a tee. Might as well get comfortable, I thought, with a vision of myself curled up cozily with the phone while Kirk whispered how much he’d missed me. Admittedly, he wasn’t usually so demonstrative, but I had begun to look forward to a certain heightened display of intimacy whenever he returned from one of his business trips. Once I even lay in wait at his apartment, wearing a black lacy bra and thong. You can imagine what kind of amazing sex we had that night.

With a glance at the clock, I realized it was 9:10 already— so where was my phone call? My hey-baby-missed-you-so-much-I-could-die speech? Maybe there were delays at the airport…