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Engaging Men
Lynda Curnyn
When one ex-boyfriend gets married, a girl can laugh it off. With two, she begins to get nervous. But three? Three?Angie DiFranco is starting to take it personally. What is it about her that doesn't incite men to plunk down large sums of money in the name of eternal love?According to her one successfully married friend, men are like tight lids. One woman comes along, loosens him up, leaving him for the next woman to pop off the lid, no problem. After all, would Jennifer have landed Brad so easily without the Gwyneth factor?Suddenly Angie looks at Kirk, her current boyfriend, with new eyes. Kirk, whose last girlfriend loosened his lid by giving him The Ultimatum. Kirk, who suddenly seems primed to be popped right open.If the tight-lid theory is true, Angie could be married within a year–with a little effort. And a little help from her friends….
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR LYNDA CURNYN’S DEBUT NOVEL, CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-GIRLFRIEND:
“First-time novelist Curnyn pens an easy, breezy first novel that’s part Sex and the City with more heart and part Bridget Jones with less booze.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A diverse cast of engaging, occasionally offbeat characters, the hilarious sayings attributed to them, and a fast-paced style facilitated by Emma’s pithy sound-bite ‘confessions’ add to the fun in a lively Manhattan-set story…”
—Library Journal
“Readers will eagerly turn the pages…”
—Booklist
“Fabulous fun. The perfect antidote for the break-up blues.”
—Sarah Mlynowski, author of Milkrun
“…absolutely hilarious secondary characters. They alone are worth the cover price.”
—Romantic Times
“Lynda Curnyn has written a novel featuring a heroine that most people will enjoy reading about and even sympathize with her intense angst. Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend is part comedy, but mostly a serious, delightful look at people at a painful point in their lives.”
—Bookbrowser.com
“Well written, with catchy dialogue and heartfelt sincerity.”
—Rendezvous
For Alexandra and Samantha
Dream big, little girls!
Engaging Men
Lynda Curnyn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A big thank-you to all who inspired and supported me during the writing of this book:
My family, especially my wise and beautiful mother, who always knows what to say, just when I need to hear it.
My wonderful editor, Joan Marlow Golan, for her insightful editorial expertise, her amazing support and most of all, her TLC.
All the talented people behind Red Dress Ink, especially Margaret Marbury, senior editor extraordinaire and dear friend. Laura Morris, Margie Miller, Tara Kelly and RDI’s own engaging man, Craig Swinwood.
All my wonderful friends, especially Linda Guidi, for always listening (even when I don’t…). Stacey Kamel, for bringing on the laughter. Julie Ann Coney, for that fab photo of me and the facts on adoptive search. Anne Canadeo, for the Tight-Lid Theory that inspired this book, and her sage writing advice. Jennifer Bernstein, Lisa Sklar and Farrin Jacobs, for keeping me from wigging out. Sarah Mlynowski, for always telling me how fabulous I am and for, umm, lending me her boyfriend (it’s not what you think…).
Elizabeth Irene, who told me just what it takes to make it as an actor in this town. Michael Scotto di Carlo (aka Motorcycle) and Katrina Lorne for the cool Web site. Pam Spengler-Jaffee, for sharing her PR savvy, as well as margaritas and the post-book Elton and Billy serenade.
And let us not forget all the ex-boyfriends (you know who you are…) who inadvertently inspired me to write this book, by sheer virtue of the fact that none of them ever actually got around to proposing.
Contents
1 Tight lids and other theories of male behavior.
2 I’m not really a wife, but I play one on TV.
3 Welcome to Brooklyn. Population: Married
4 I just called…to SCREAM…I LOVE YOU!
5 A rose by any other name…might still do the trick.
6 Love means never having to pack an overnight bag.
7 All a girl needs is a little courage—and a hefty credit line.
8 I have seen the future (and it’s gonna cost a bundle).
9 Caution: This jar is not a toy! Please keep out of reach of children.
10 A nose is a nose is a nose….
11 When life gives you lemons, screw the lemonade. You need a real cocktail.
12 Happiness might just be a warm gun.
13 Till death (at 30,000 feet) do us part.
14 I shoulda packed the ruby slippers….
15 I’m in a New York state of…mania.
16 And you thought it was just a common house plant.
17 I’ll take a carat and a half—hold the husband.
18 Love happens. (And there really is nothing you can do about it.)
19 The heart is a hearty muscle (Thank God).
Epilogue
1
Tight lids and other theories of male behavior.
It started with a message on my answering machine.
“Guess who’s getting married?” came a voice I knew all too well.
It was Josh. My ex-boyfriend. Turned someone else’s fiancé. Not that I’d ever wanted to marry Josh, who suffered from an aversion to dental floss. “Did prehistoric man floss?” he would argue. “Is prehistoric man still around?” I argued back. We lasted only six months, then I told him I couldn’t see myself at sixty-five, making sure he took his teeth out at bedtime every night. “Okay, okay. I’ll floss,” he’d replied. But it was too late. The romance was gone.
Now he was getting married. To someone he’d met not three months after we had broken up four years ago. And he wasn’t the first ex-boyfriend to go this route. Randy, the boyfriend before Josh, was whistling “The Wedding March” a mere six weeks after we had tearfully said our goodbyes. Then there was Vincent, my first love—he’d been married for nearly a decade. According to my mother—who lived within shouting distance of his mother in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and never failed to keep me updated—Vincent and his wife were already on their third kid.
One ex gets married, a girl can laugh it off. Two begins a nervous twitter. But three? Three?
A girl starts to take it personally. I mean, what was it about me that didn’t incite men to plunk down large sums of money in the name of eternal love?
“It’s the tight-lid dilemma,” my friend Michelle said when I expressed my despair at sending another man to the altar without me.
“Tight lid?” I asked, awaiting some pearl of wisdom that might turn my world upright again. After all, in the time it had taken me to get a four-year degree in business administration that I no longer made use of, Michelle, who’d grown up three blocks away from me in Marine Park, had gotten a husband, a house and a diamond the size of New Jersey.
“You know the scenario,” she continued. “You struggle for a good while trying to open a jar and the lid won’t budge. But sure enough, the next person you hand that jar to pops the lid off, no problem. I mean, you don’t really think Jennifer Aniston, cute haircut aside, would have landed Brad Pitt without the Gwyneth factor, do you? Then there’s me and Frankie, of course,” she continued, referring to her husband of seven years, whom she had snagged soon after his devastating breakup with Rosanna Cuzio, the prom queen of our high school.
I couldn’t deny the pattern, once Michelle had laid it out so neatly before me. Clearly I had been instrumental in warming Josh, Randy and Vincent up for the next girl to come along and slap with a wedding vow. Gosh, I should have at least been maid of honor for my efforts.
Instead, I was nothing but the ex-girlfriend who might or might not get invited to the wedding, depending on how secure the bride felt about her future husband.
Suddenly I looked at Kirk, my current boyfriend, with new eyes. We had been together a year and eight months, by far the record for me since my three-year stint with Randy. We had become quite a cozy little couple, Kirk and I. I even got party invitations addressed to both of us—that’s how serious everyone thought we were. The question was: Would Kirk be inviting me to his wedding someday or…?
“Kirk…sweetie,” I said, as we lay in bed together that night, a flickering blue screen before us and the prospect of sex lingering like an unasked question in the air.
“Uh-huh,” he said, not removing his gaze from the cop show that apparently had him enraptured.
“Your last girlfriend…Susan?”
“Yeah?” he said, glancing at me with trepidation. Clearly he saw in the making one of those “relationship talks” men dread.
“You guys went out a long time, right? What was it, two years?”
“Three and a half,” he said with a shudder that made me swallow with fear. Apparently I was heading for rough waters.
Still I plunged on. “And you guys never talked, um, about…marriage?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding me? That’s what broke us up. She gave me the old ultimatum—we get married or we’re through.” He snorted. “Needless to say, I chose door number two.”
Aha. Relief filled me and I snuggled closer to Kirk, allowing him to sink back into his vegetative state as the cops on TV slapped cuffs on some unsuspecting first offender.
If Susan was the lid loosener, that could mean only one thing: I could pop this guy wide open. Hell, I could be married within the year.
The next day, I met my best friend, Grace, for a celebratory lunch, which was always an event as Grace, with her high-powered career and high-maintenance boyfriend, barely had time to get together at all anymore. As a concession to her hectic lifestyle, we met at a restaurant two blocks from her office on E. 54th Street and Park Avenue. Of course, Grace didn’t know I was celebrating until I clinked my water glass into hers and said, “Congratulate me. I’m getting married.”
“What?” Grace said, her blue-gray eyes bulging in disbelief. Her gaze immediately fell to the ring finger of my left hand, which, naturally, was bare.
“Not now. But someday.”
She rolled her eyes, sniffed and said with her usual irony, “Congratulations.”
Leave it to Grace to laugh in the face of being thirty-three without a wedding band on her finger. She is the strongest, most independent person I know. Not only does she always manage to keep a killer boyfriend on hand, she has a killer job as a product manager for Roxanne Dubrow Cosmetics. Yes, that Roxanne Dubrow. The one you have to hike all the way to Saks Fifth Avenue for. Grace briefly dated my brother Sonny when we were in junior high, but we didn’t really bond until she saved my life on the playground of Marine Park Junior High. I was about to get my head slammed into the concrete by some giant bully of a girl named Nancy, who seemed determined to hurt me just because I was a good fifty pounds lighter than she was. Grace stepped in, tall and blond and strong, and told Nancy to take a hike. Everyone, even Nancy, was afraid of Grace. I was in awe of her. Even more so when she adopted me as her new best friend, despite the fact that I was in eighth grade and she in ninth. Her posse of ninth-grade girlfriends was not happy to have me tagging along. But Grace wouldn’t have it otherwise.
And here we were, still friends. The only two from the old neighborhood who had escaped unscathed, without marrying some thick-necked thug named Sal and popping out babies on an annual basis. Of course, Grace’s parents had dragged her away from the neighborhood to Long Island when she turned sixteen, hoping suburbia would save her from the cigarettes and boys and bad behavior to which she had taken and in which I couldn’t wait to indulge, myself. But we still spent our summers together. In fact, I felt a bit like a Fresh Air Fund kid, the way my parents shipped me off come June. Then Grace moved into the city right after college, and I followed a year later. She was the sister I’d never had, and my mother had even dubbed her an honorary member of our family.
“Don’t you ever worry, Grace? That you’ll wind up alone?” I asked now, searching her face for some sign of vulnerability.
She shrugged. “A woman in this city can have everything she wants. If she plays her cards right.”
Easy for Grace to say. Tall, voluptuous, with chin-length, tousled blond hair and perfectly sculpted features, she was beautiful. While I…I had always been “little Angie DiFranco”—and still was—five foot four with a head of wavy black hair that defied all styling products, and thighs that threatened to turn into my mother’s any day now. I sighed. It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t marry Kirk, I didn’t know what would become of me.
“What about you and Drew?” I asked now, wondering if Grace had been contemplating her current beau as a future husband. “Do you ever think about…you know?”
“Of course,” Grace said. “Every girl thinks about it.”
I felt relieved. At least I wasn’t the only thirtysomething unmarried hysteric. And Grace and Drew had been dating barely a year—at least eight months less than Kirk and I.
“But it’s not everything,” she said with a shrug.
Grace was right, I realized the next day as I headed for work. Marriage wasn’t everything. I had so much going on right now, it was practically a nonissue. I was an actor, and at the moment a working actor, which was really something. Granted my steady gig was Rise and Shine, a children’s exercise program on cable access, but it was good experience in front of a camera, at least according to an agent I had spoken to, who refused to take me on until I had experience outside of the numerous off-off Broadway shows I’d done.
But as I slid into the yellow leotard and baby-blue tights that were my lot as the show’s co-host, I wondered, for about the hundredth time, what, exactly, my résumé would say about me, now that I had spent six months leaping and stretching with a group of six-year-olds.
“Hey, Colin,” I called out to my co-host once I entered the studio, cup of coffee firmly in grasp. One downside of this job was that it meant getting up at five in the morning to make the show’s six o’clock taping. Apparently, it was the only time the station had allotted studio space for the program, which had a solid, albeit small, audience of upper-middle-class parents and the children they hoped to mold, literally.
Colin looked up from the book he was reading, startled, before he broke out in his usual smile. Colin was the only person I knew who could smile at six in the morning. It was his nature to be cheerful, which was why he was such a fabulous host for Rise and Shine. The kids loved him, and in the six months that I had gotten to know him, I loved him, too. He was warm, generous, loving, good with children. Not to mention gorgeous, with softly chiseled features, blue eyes surrounded by thick lashes and short dark hair always cut in the most up-to-date style. Everything a woman could want in a prospective husband. In fact, I might have dated him until he married someone else—if he weren’t gay, that is.
“Whatcha reading?” I said, bending over to see the title of his book.
“Oh, this.” He smiled, looking somewhat embarrassed as he held up a well-thumbed volume of The Challenges of Child-Rearing. “Figured it might help, you know. With the show.”
I laughed at this. “Colin, we just have to keep them fit, not raise them.”
He chuckled. “I know, I know. But you’ve seen how rambunctious they can get.”
I smiled. Colin really took this job on Rise and Shine very seriously.
“You ready?” he said now.
I sighed. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
It still amazed me that I had even landed this gig—up until my audition, I hadn’t exercised a day in my life. Yet, there I was, every weekday morning, cheerfully urging a group of ten sleepy-eyed kids to stretch, jump, run and tone. Lucky for me, my baby-blue tights were thick enough to hide cellulite.
