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“I’m really scared, Jack.”
“Of what?”
“You know…” Conscious that the fifty or so people standing within arm’s length might be eavesdropping, I whisper, “Death.”
“Relax. You’re not going to die.”
“How do you know?”
“Because—well, why would you think you’re going to die?” he asks, loudly enough to be heard in Brooklyn.
Terrific. If the guy with the gun/umbrella/penis didn’t think of opening fire yet, Jack just gave him the idea.
“I don’t,” I snap. “I don’t think I’m going to die.”
“But you just said—”
“I was joking.” Before I can muster a requisite laugh, the lights go back on and the engine whirs to life.
The train starts moving again as if none of this ever happened.
Problem over, just like that.
Panic attack averted.
At least for now.
“See?” Jack says. “I told you you’d survive.”
“We’re not home yet,” I point out. “It’s not survival until we’re safe at home.”
“Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug. Actually, I’ve been in a permanent shrug since we got on the train, thanks to the close quarters. “I just really want to get home.”
Jack just looks at me for a second, then says, “You really are stressed.”
“I really am stressed.”
And you’re the cause of it.
All right, so he had nothing to do with the stalled subway.
But I do find myself thinking life’s minor—and major—disruptions would be much easier to handle if we were engaged.
Then I find myself thinking, in sheer disgust, that I really am one of those marriage-obsessed women after all.
I’m Kate, when she was hell-bent on marrying Billy. All she ever wanted to do was speculate on the status of their marital future, ad nauseam. Raphael and I thought she was our worst nightmare then. Little did we know she’d be even scarier once she had the ring on her finger and a formal Southern wedding to plan.
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
Speaking 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 metrosexual.
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 metrosexual? 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.
