Now do you understand how I’ve gotten so wrapped up in being wrapped up every day of the week? Kirk and I might as well get married at this point. What would be the difference, anyway?
“The ring,” Michelle explained somewhat impatiently when I complained the next day about how much I am suffering and wondering, really, what it’s all going to get me.
“When a guy buys you a ring, it means something.”
So I sat tight for yet another night, telling Kirk I had a monologue I was working on. “Oh yeah?” he said with surprise. Of course he was surprised. I hadn’t done any auditioning since Rise and Shine became a cable-access phenomenon. Why should I? I was on the road to superstardom in a yellow leotard.
But suddenly there I was, reverting to my former self. The actor who had played Fefu in Fefu and Her Friends. (Don’t let the name fool you—this was a serious role.) The woman who had once wowed crowds at the Classic Stage Company with my powerful rendition of Miss Julie. In case you were wondering, I was once a force to be reckoned with. But an actor has to earn a living….
“What are you doing home?” Justin asked, loping in from God knows where. He’d turned down the last production gig he’d been offered, so I knew he hadn’t been working on the set all day. In fact, he seemed to be working less and less ever since he had landed a few commercial spots for a long-distance telephone service a year ago, which I thought was pretty ironic, considering the number of long-distance relationships Justin had been in (yes, Lauren wasn’t the only one. Denise, his previous girlfriend, was from Oak Park, Illinois, Justin’s hometown—a place Justin hadn’t lived in himself since he was twelve, although his romance with Denise had begun on a visit to relatives one summer when he was in college). The commercial, which featured Justin looking frazzled and gorgeous as he ran across a campus and up the dormitory stairs, all in time to pick up a long-distance call from his mom, was so well received that they made two more. One in which Justin leaped across buildings to pick up a call, and another where he hijacked a campus security cart. His success had mostly to do with that utterly beatific smile on his face as he picked up the receiver and said, “Hi, Mom.” Ironic, too, since both of Justin’s parents had been killed in an auto accident, leaving him an orphan at the tender age of twelve, shipped off to live in New York with his aging Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Burt, who were now gone a good nine years themselves. Maybe there was something of the yearning I knew he still felt for his parents injected in the smile he projected from the small screen once he picked up that telephone. Whatever it was, the commercial ran so often—it even made Superbowl Sunday slots—that Justin was still coasting on the pile of residuals money he’d racked up. Perhaps that was making it harder and harder for him to get out of bed for the odd production job that came his way.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I replied, defensive. Sometimes the ease of Justin’s life annoyed me, I have to admit.
He ignored my irritated reply, plopping down next to me on the couch.
“Where’s Kirk?” he asked. Even Justin realized my life was so intimately entwined with Kirk’s that my being home on a weeknight meant something.
“Don’t know. Home, I guess,” I said, picking up the remote and surfing through, hoping my expression showed my indifference. I didn’t really want anyone to know what I was up to, especially not Justin. It was downright…humiliating. But utterly necessary.
Then the phone rang and I was completely unmasked. “If it’s Kirk, I’m, I’m…not home,” I blurted as Justin reached for the receiver.
He turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised, as he spoke into the phone. “Hello? Hey, Kirk, my man, what’s up?” he continued, his voice belying the suspicion in his eyes as he gazed at me. “Angie? Naw, she’s not home. But then I didn’t check under the rug….”
I glared at him, despite my humiliation.
“Okay, I’ll tell her you called,” he said. “Take it easy.” After he hung up, he turned to stare at me full in the face.
I ignored him, lost in my own quagmire. “What the hell is he calling me for anyway? I told him I was busy.”
Justin’s eyes widened. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing!”
“God, Ange, don’t tell me you’re playing games,” he said. “I didn’t think you were like that….”
“I’m not!” I insisted. But suddenly it seemed glaringly apparent that I was one of those women I despised.
5
A rose by any other name…might still do the trick.
I would have despised myself even more for shamelessly avoiding Kirk if I didn’t come off the Saturday shift at Lee and Laurie to find him waiting out in front of the building for me.
“Hey,” he said, a smile lighting up his features as I came out the front doors.
“Kirk!” I said, surprised, realizing that he hadn’t done anything so spontaneous, so…romantic, since the early days of our relationship. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, stranger,” he said, putting his arms around me and tugging me close. “I missed you.” Then he kissed me so tenderly I felt a rush of warmth toward him.
Now I ask you, can you blame me for playing these stupid games? Especially when Kirk led me back to his apartment and made love to me like it was our last night on earth together.
Two simultaneous orgasms later, I was a goner.
Which is probably why I found myself sitting across from Michelle at a tiny table in the back of a bar by our office on Tuesday night, plying her with drinks while I smoked cigarette after cigarette from her pack, reveling in my relationship revival and anxiously awaiting advice on my next maneuver.
Hanging out with Michelle after hours was a peculiar enough event as it was, because we hadn’t really been social since high school—specifically, since just after Grace moved to Long Island and I had moved on to my first serious boyfriend, Vincent. At the time, Michelle had been dating Vincent’s cousin Eddie, and we bonded simply because it was always useful to have a girlfriend around all those nights we roamed the streets with the guys, restlessly searching for adventure and usually winding up at a diner or the movies, blowing what little money we had. Though Michelle was a bit of a fair-weather friend (or a fair-man friend—we parted ways when she moved on to Frankie, who ran with a different crowd), at least for a while I had someone around to tell me whether I had lipstick on my teeth or if some cheerleader had been spotted at school that day flirting a little too hard with Vincent. In truth, Michelle and I wouldn’t even be friends now, except that when I gave up my job in the garment district four years ago, my mother had told the whole neighborhood (including Michelle’s mother, whom she’d run into at the supermarket) that I was jobless, penniless and about to pursue a career with no pension plan. Mrs. Delgrosso had happily told my mother about her daughter’s illustrious career and flexible hours at Lee and Laurie and put me in contact.
But despite all my doubts, I couldn’t help turning to Michelle now that step one had succeeded in at least a quarter turn on Kirk’s lid. Suddenly I was ready to be persuaded that the art of persuasion was my only resource when it came to Kirk.
“Make him jealous,” Michelle said with a definitive crack of her gum.
