Slightly Engaged (8 page)

Now here I am, my own worst nightmare.

How did this happen?

As the train hurtles toward uptown, I tell myself firmly that it
didn’t
happen—yet—and it
won’t
happen. I will not focus my energy on an engagement that may or may not be imminent.

If Jack wants to marry me, great.

If not…

Well, not great. But not the end of the world, either.

Mental note: time to stop dwelling on getting engaged.

This wanna-be-fiancée stuff is getting old. I need to toss my secret stash of bridal magazines and stop asking everyone—except Jack—why he hasn’t proposed yet.

Not that I’m going to ask Jack, either.

I’ll have more patience than…well, more patience than I had with Will, for whom I waited an entire summer.

In vain, I might add.

Chapter 6

S
peaking of Will, guess who calls me at work the Monday morning after the Sweetest Day when I don’t get engaged?

Yes, Will McCraw, the man—and I use the term loosely—who left for summer stock and never came back. To
me,
that is. He did return to New York that fall, and he brought with him a souvenir—a blonde named Esme Spencer, with whom he said he had more in common than he did with me. Meaning, she was also a self-absorbed drama queen.

I do not use
“queen”
loosely, despite the fact that I am apparently the only person in the tristate area who believes in Will’s heterosexuality.

I should know, right? I slept with him for three years and can attest that not every good-looking, cologne-and-couture-wearing, narcissistic actor is gay.

Then again, Will secretly being gay could make his lack of interest in me easier to bear. Not that I’m still pining away for him in the least. But when you’re as insecure as I used to be—and all right, still am in some ways—then you don’t easily get over not being desired by your own boyfriend.

Nevertheless, I truly ninety-nine-point-nine percent believe that what Will McCraw
is,
aside from a self-absorbed drama queen and a cheating bastard, is a flaming
metro
sexual.

What Tracey Spadolini is, according to said flaming metrosexual, is sadly bourgeois.

You wanted somebody who would love you and marry you and settle down with you.

That was Will’s breakup accusation, and in his opinion, the ultimate insult. It was also true then and still is, only now I’m not ashamed of it.

My breakup accusation was, “You kept me around because I was as crazy about you as you are about yourself.”

Also true, and a long time in coming.

How I didn’t realize that from the start is beyond me. I guess I was so beyond insecure, so obsessed with being forty pounds overweight and a small-town hick masquerading as a city girl, that I was grateful just to have a boyfriend.

When I think of how I lapped up the slightest attention from Will like melting chocolate ice cream on a ninety-degree day…

Well, it makes me sicker than the ice cream would if it sat out in the sun for an entire ninety-degree day before I ate it.

Will dumped Esme, as all my friends predicted he would, and came crawling back, as all my friends predicted he would, right around the time I met Jack.

Maybe even
because
I met Jack, since Will certainly wasn’t interested in me when I was whiling away a solitary New York summer with only cabbage soup and
Gulliver’s Travels
for company.

Fortunately, I was never the least bit tempted to hook up with Will again.

All right, maybe I
was
tempted just
once.
The night Jack almost chose the Giants playoff game over me, I almost made a huge mistake.

But he didn’t choose the game, and I didn’t choose Will, and Jack and I are living happily ever after—more or less—while Will the Flaming Metrosexual is still trying to become the next Mandy Patinkin.

He calls often to update me on his progress.

This morning, in response to my fake-jovial “Will! How the hell are you?” he jumps right in with, “Tracey, guess what?”

Will is not the kind of person who requires much conversational feedback, so I don’t bother to guess. In fact, I don’t bother to stop checking my Monday-morning e-mail, which is what I was doing when the phone rang.

“I’ve got an audition.”

Yawn.

“And it’s not stage this time. It’s for a film,” he adds quickly lest I erroneously assume it’s for a stool-softener commercial.

“That’s great, Will.” So he’s given up on becoming the next Mandy Patinkin in favor of becoming the next Johnny Depp. Yeah, that’ll happen.

I reach for my cigarettes before remembering that I can’t smoke here. Damn. I clutch the pack anyway, planning to make a beeline for an elevator to the street the second I’m done listening to Will spout gems like, “Trust me, Tracey—this role is so
me.
”

“I trust you.” So there’s obviously an open casting call for a self-absorbed drama queen cheating bastard flaming
metro
sexual? Talk about typecasting.

“I’m going to blow them away, Trace.”

Trace,
he calls me, because we’re just that cozy.

“That’s awesome,” I say in a tone that might hint that
awesome
semi-rhymes with
ho-hum.

“I know!” he exclaims, too caught up in this revolutionary moment in the Life of Will to catch any hint of hohumness on my part. “If I don’t get this, I’ll be shocked.”

“So will I,” I say blandly, scanning an e-mailed chain letter on the off chance that forwarding it to five hundred people in the next minute will shrink Will’s ego to the size of his—

“It’s a romantic lead,” he tells me. “That’s my thing.”

Yeah, not in my life.

“The only thing that could really put a lock on the role for me would be if it involved singing.”

“No singing?”

“No, but I’ve got the acting skills to carry it, you know?”

Naturally, he waits for me to confirm his well-rounded fabulousness. “Yeah, I know,” I say unenthusiastically.

“Fifi told me just Thursday that I’m at the top of my game.”

He’s talking about Fifi La Bouche, an eccentric Parisian choreographer friend of his. She’s about eighty and still looks great in a leotard. I know this because that’s what she’s wearing every time I’ve ever met her. She wears it everywhere, to lunch, to shop, to stroll—just a leotard under a trench coat, as if at any moment she might be asked to put together a jazzy chorus-line routine.

“That’s great,” I murmur, finding it hard to believe that I was ever an avid player in the Life of Will, starring Will, directed by Will, produced by Will.

“What film are you auditioning for?” I ask, because apparently it’s still my turn.

Dramatic pause. “It’s actually really hush-hush. I can’t really say.”

Okay, ten to one that means he’s auditioning for the role of Pizza Deliveryman or Crowd Spectator #4 in one of those Lifetime trauma-of-the-week movies, or something of that ilk.

“Well, good luck,” I tell him, methodically deleting spam without bothering to muffle the mouse clicks. “I hope you get it.”

“I’ve got a good feeling about it,” says Will, who has a good feeling about everything he’s ever done, is now doing, or will someday do. On camera, onstage, in the bedroom, even in the bathroom, because I’m certain Will honestly believes that when he takes a shit white doves fly down from heaven to bear it ceremoniously away.

There was a time when I almost believed that, too.

Thank God, thank God, thank
God
he dumped me.

If he hadn’t, would I have found the common sense to dump him?

Or would I still be his girlfriend?

Or, God forbid, his
wife?

I’ll tell you this: I’d definitely rather be
not
engaged to Jack than
married
to Will.

The irony is that just a few years ago, I had this whole vision of our future mapped out, oblivious to the fact that all Will had mapped out was the fastest route to the bright lights of North Mannfield’s Valley Playhouse.

When he left New York and then failed to call or write, then cheated, then ultimately dumped me, I had no idea he was doing me the biggest favor of my life.

Which just goes to show you…

Well, I’m not sure exactly what it goes to show
you,
but it showed me that I wasn’t always the best judge of character back then.

I am now, of course.

And I’m definitely as over Will as I am My Little Pony, jelly bracelets and slumber parties.

As Will talks on about his latest audition and the hush-hush movie that he can’t discuss but it has some major stars and a famous director and if I knew I would just die, I click on through my e-mail, deleting most of it.

Until I get to the most recent one, from my friend Buckley, which just popped up.

“…and they said I absolutely have the look,”
Will says,
“and that I…”

With Will, you barely even have to offer an occasional uh-huh to keep the conversation going, so I can to focus all my attention on Buckley’s message.

Hey, Trace, writes Buckley, with whom I
am
just that cozy.

Well, maybe not
that
cozy.

Although I’ll confess that I wonder occasionally whether Buckley and I might have had a chance together if the timing had been different.

I was attracted to him from the moment we met—and it was mutual. He immediately asked me out to the movies, which was why I logically assumed he must be gay.

I know, but there I was, on the verge of losing Will, overweight and underconfident, certain that no guy as cute and normal as Buckley would possibly want to date me.

By the time I figured things out, he was with Sonja. If he hadn’t met her, and I hadn’t met Jack, I might be living with Buckley now and wondering why we aren’t engaged.

Funny, the way things work out. Or not.

Buckley and I did attempt a fling once.

It was post-Will, and post-meeting but pre-loving Jack. Oh, and mid-Sonja, although she doesn’t know. They were temporarily broken up at the time. Buckley and I fell into each other’s arms while crying into too many beers one night at a pool hall.

At long last, I discovered the answer to that burning question:
What is it like to make out with cute, boy-next-door-ish Buckley?

I also quickly discovered—as did Buckley—that we made better friends than lovers.

Not that we ever got
that
far. Lovers, I mean. A couple of passionate kisses—
searing
kisses, mind you—was the extent of our almost affair.

Then Buckley moved on and in with Sonja and I moved on and in with Jack and here we all are, defiant sin-livers, the last of a dying breed.

“…so then I went and changed into a pair of jeans,”
Will is saying,
“and that cashmere sweater that everyone says matches my eyes…”

So Buckley and I are destined to be friends who double-date and read the same books and are aspiring copywriters.

Well,
I’m
aspiring.

Buckley is already a copywriter, lucky dog. He freelances all over the city and whenever he’s working near Blair Barnett, we have lunch.

Which is why he’s e-mailing me today:

Hey, Trace, are you free for sushi at one? My treat. I’ll meet you on the corner of Forty-eighth and Second.

Yes! Lunch with Buckley is just what I need to take my mind off the most unromantic Sweetest Day ever, which Jack and I spent watching Game One of the World Series.

The Yankees were losing from the first pitch, at which moment Jack’s euphoria instantly transformed into despondency. By the time Raphael called at what he thought might be “halftime” to inform me that he and Donatello were officially engaged, the Yankees were down by fourteen and Jack was downright miserable.

In the wake of Raphael’s phone call, so was I.

Not that I wasn’t happy for the happy groom-and-groom-to-be, because I was. And still am.

But Jack’s reaction was less than encouraging.

I waited until the commercial break to announce the glad nuptial tidings.

Jack said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Why? Just because it’s not legal?”

“That too, but—”

“Just because it’s Raphael?”

“That too,” he agreed again, “but—”

Because it’s crazy to get married, period?

Was that it? I thought it was. I was waiting for him to say it. Before he could—if indeed he was about to—the game came back on, and the Yankees lost spectacularly. End of conversation. All conversation.

The team somehow blew it again last night, and Jack was still glowering when I left him by the elevator a little while ago.

Some weekend. I’ve never welcomed a Monday morning as wholeheartedly as I did this one.

Hi Buckley! Lunch sounds great, I type jauntily. See you then and there.