Engaging Men - Lynda Curnyn

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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

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