Lynda Curnyn - Engaging Men

“Hey, Noodles?” Kirk said now, pulling a pair of jeans over his boxers and donning a T-shirt. “I’m gonna run down to Duane Reade and pick up a few things for my trip. Need anything?”

Yeah, I thought: my head examined. “Um, no, I’m all right,” I replied cautiously.

“Okay, I’ll be back in fifteen, then.” He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the forehead before making his way out the front door.

The minute I heard the door slam behind him, I picked up the phone. I needed another perspective. Specifically: an ex-boyfriend’s perspective. And since pride prevented me from calling back the newly engaged Josh just yet, I dialed up Randy, whose number I still had safely tucked in my memory banks. After all, not marrying the men in your life did have its advantages. I had managed to turn at least two of my ex-boyfriends into friends.

“I didn’t think you were into all that,” Randy said, after we’d exchanged greetings and I’d inquired about why the marriage issue had never come up for us.

“Into all what?” I asked.

“You know, marriage, kids. Hey, did I tell you Cheryl and I are working on our first?”

“That’s wonderful,” I said in a daze. “What exactly do you mean I’m not into marriage, kids?”

Randy chuckled. “C’mon, Ange, you know as well as I do that your career came first. You always wanted to be the big movie star.”

“Actor. I am an actor.”

“Whatever.”

When I hung up a short while later, I began to wonder if maybe I was projecting the wrong image. True, I had long been harboring the dream of making a career of the acting talent I had been lavishly praised for all through high school and college. And though I hadn’t exactly landed my dream role in the four years since I had left a steady job in sales to pursue acting, Rise and Shine counted for something, didn’t it?

Suddenly I had to start getting realistic, if I hoped to ever get a grip on this particular lid. I was thirty-one years old. I wasn’t getting any younger, as my mother lost no opportunity of reminding me. I needed to start looking like a wife.

When I arrived home after the show the next morning and discovered Justin trying to tug a sofa through the narrow entrance foyer of our apartment, I realized that even if I didn’t look like a wife, I was quite capable of sounding like one. Big time.

“What on earth are you doing?” I cried, though I knew exactly what he was up to. Collecting other people’s castoffs. For as lovable as Justin was, he had the single worst trait you could have in a roommate: He was a pack rat.

“Hey,” he said, glancing up at me from where he stood, bent over his latest find: a turquoise-green sofa that had clearly seen better days. “Can you believe someone left this for garbage?”

Uh, yeah, I thought, studying the yellow floral trim and sunken seat cushions with renewed horror.

“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 home 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.