Читать книгу Engaging Men - Lynda Curnyn, Lynda Curnyn - Страница 12

What it ultimately meant was that I had to suffer 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. Yes, Josh 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 The Yearning 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 health-care….”

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.

“So, you folks ready to order?”

“I am,” said Josh, glancing up at me in question.

“Uh, yeah. You order first,” I said, burying myself in the menu, my appetite gone. How was it that Josh always had a knack for making me realize the pure insanity of my life?

“I’ll have the Pad Thai,” I said finally, ordering the same thing I always ordered whenever I ate Thai. Boring, yes, but at least I knew what I was getting. And I liked to be sure of something in life. Besides, I was allergic to so many things, it saved me from having to interrogate the waiter about hidden ingredients that could potentially kill me in the other entrée choices.

“So let me tell you how I did it,” Josh said, and I knew, without any further clarification, what “it” was. The proposal. I sipped my water, pasted on a smile and listened while Josh proceeded to tell me all about the glorious evening he asked Emily Fairbanks to be his wife. Josh prided himself on being a romantic. In fact, he still gets on my case that I didn’t appreciate all his valiant attempts to woo me (okay, forgive me if I didn’t find rowing across the lake out front of his parents’ family cabin in the Poconos on the hottest day of the year romantic). But as he told me about the carriage ride across Central Park (a bit clichéd, but we’ll give him points for big spending), how the moon hung low in the sky and the only sound was the gentle clip-clop of the horse’s hooves (I’m sure there was traffic. There’s always traffic. But never mind…). How Emily’s eyes lit up when he turned to her in the cozy little seat, took her hand in his and said those words he had never uttered to another woman before.

I have to say, I got a little choked up there. Especially when I saw shining in Josh’s eyes what looked like the real thing. Love. For Emily Fairbanks, whose most notable quality (in my mind, anyway) was a certain nobility of brow and good skin.

I smiled, the lump thickening in my throat. I was happy for him. Really, truly happy. Because if Josh, with whom I shared not only the same allergy prescription but the same paralyzing anxieties, could get married, then, hell, I would be just fine.

“So let me know when I have to get my tux,” I said, referring to our old joke that I would have to be Josh’s “best man,” since I was (at least according to him) his closest friend.

And then Josh ducked his head and actually blushed.

“Okay, okay,” I continued to banter, unaware of the source of his discomfort, “I’ll wear a dress if I have to. But no taffeta!”

But when Josh continued to avert his gaze, I realized our old joke was no longer funny. And I suspected I knew why.

“I am coming to the wedding, aren’t I?”

Finally he looked up, his gaze hesitant. “Actually, Emily and I…well, we were just talking about, well, you…and she doesn’t really feel, uh, comfortable with, uh, inviting…that is to say, uh—” he ducked his head once more “—you.”

My mouth opened to speak, but not a word was forthcoming. After all, though we didn’t hang out much anymore, Josh and I were friends. And though we hadn’t fared well as a couple, we had come to depend on each other in some ways. At least until Emily had entered the picture.

“C’mon, Ange,” Josh said now. “You have to understand how Emily must feel. I mean, you are my ex-girlfriend.”

And, apparently, I thought as I scanned his embarrassed features for some sign of the man I thought was one of my closest friends, that’s all I would ever be.

But I didn’t have time to ponder my flagging relationship with Josh. Because suddenly my relationship with Kirk took a turn for the better.

When I came home from dinner that night, there was a message blinking on my answering machine. “Call me when you get in,” came Kirk’s voice over the machine (rather insistently, I might add).

I opted not to call.

What? It was late. I didn’t want to wake him up.

Besides, I didn’t want to do anything to break my feeling of sheer power. A power that only grew when, while I was sitting at my desk at Lee and Laurie the next day, Jerry Landry leaned over my cube, eyes gleaming as if he were going to tell me some dirty secret, and said, “You got a call at the control station from Kirk. You want me to transfer him?”

“Sure,” I said, my insides shimmering with an excitement I had not felt since the early days of Kirk’s and my relationship. I glanced at Michelle, who raised an eyebrow at me. Kirk never called at the office. Not only was it near impossible to get through during the day, he never really had a need to. Until now.

“Thank you for calling Lee and Laurie Catalog, where casual comes easy,” I answered as I was supposed to, praying Kirk’s call had gotten to me before a customer’s.

“Hey,” Kirk said, “what’s going on?”

“Hey,” I replied, as calmly as I could.

“Why didn’t you call me back last night?” he demanded. I almost felt a pinch of guilt at the hurt in his tone.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, rushing to make amends as was my nature (despite what you might think of me, I really am no good at this game-playing stuff). “It was just so late when I got home and I figured you were tired, and—”

“What the hell time did you get home?”

Wow, he was mad. “Uh, eleven-thirty.” I neglected to explain it was because I had spent a major part of the evening letting Josh know just what I thought about the fact that he felt it necessary to exclude me from the most important day of his life. An utterly fruitless endeavor, as I discovered that not only did I not understand Emily Fairbanks, I understood Josh even less.

“What the hell were you doing?” Kirk barked. “Oh, never mind. You coming over later?”

“Later?” I glanced at Michelle, who was nodding her head in the affirmative. “Uh, okay.”

“Good, because we need to talk…. See you around ten-thirty.”

“Okay,” I said, clicking off the line and turning to face Michelle. “He wants to talk….”

“Bingo!” she proclaimed, clapping her hands together.

My eyes widened. My God. It was working….

I showed up at Kirk’s place around quarter to eleven. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t Kirk standing in the doorway of his apartment, waiting for me.

“Hey,” I said, approaching cautiously.

He didn’t answer, only pulled me into his arms and proceeded to kiss me in a way he never had before. A bit roughly. Not that I minded. In fact, I liked it very much.

I linked my arms around his neck, pressed my body into his, looked up into those gray eyes I thought I knew so well and saw something unfamiliar stirring there. I would have called it anger, if not for the kisses he kept feathering over my mouth, my chin.

And here I thought I was going to get a speech about Josh.

Kirk broke the kiss, but only long enough to lead me down the long hall to his bedroom, where he pulled me down to the bed and proceeded to molest me.

In the best way, of course.

Better. Because I had never seen Kirk in such a…fever. He was always so in control (not that that was a bad thing—it accounted for his longevity in the sack). Now he was like a man driven by demons, tearing at my clothes (well, not exactly tearing—he did have a certain respect for fashion and knew what these little Lycra numbers went for), running his hands over my body as if committing it to memory.

Once he was inside, I nearly came when he gazed down at me, a look of pure possessiveness in his eyes.

You can just imagine what effect that had on me. And this time, Kirk didn’t even attribute it to the mattress.

Now, as we lay curled into each other, I felt a ribbon of pleasure move through me. For no matter what manipulative devices had brought Kirk to this point, I couldn’t deny that what had just happened between us was very, very real.

“That was nice,” Kirk said, nuzzling my face with his and causing another flutter to rush through my satiated body.

“Yeah, it was nice,” I said, gazing up into his eyes, which had now gone soft and were looking at me in a kind of wonder.

I came home the next day after an evening during which Kirk had made love to me no less than three times. It was if he were trying to drive home (literally) the fact that I was his and no one else’s. A pretty heady experience, as you can imagine. Not even the rigorous morning I had spent at Rise and Shine could dispel the glow I was feeling.

As I rode the bus home from the studio, I realized how foolish I had been to spend money I didn’t have on azalea plants I didn’t want and steaks I would inevitably render inedible. Kirk loved me. Really loved me. I felt like an idiot for going to such lengths to prove something to myself that I should have already known. And since I knew I’d feel like an even bigger idiot when my Visa bill came, I had resolved to undo some of the damage I had inflicted on myself by returning the azalea. After all, I hadn’t ordered it. I could march it right back to Murray the florist, play the disgruntled consumer and get my money back. It was a simple plan.