Slightly Engaged

by Wendy Markham

  A cry of protest goes up in the car as people curse in every known language.

  “Still okay?” Jack asks in the dark, his voice reassuringly close to my ear. He reaches for my hand and squeezes it.

  I take a deep breath of disgusting B.O. air. “Uh-huh.”

  If this were two years ago, when I was in the midst of my panic attacks after Will left, I would be about to throw up or pass out or both.

  But the panic attacks subsided somewhere around the time Jack came along, with the help of some little pink pills that were prescribed for me by Dr. Trixie Schwartzenbaum. As a delightful pharmaceutical side effect, I lost my appetite and the remainder of the forty pounds I needed to take off.

  I eventually tapered off the pills last winter with nary a panic attack nor added pounds, but Dr. Schwartzenbaum warned me that they could be triggered again.

  The panic attacks.

  The appetite too, I guess. But at least I can combat that with my old standby weapons: cabbage soup, baby carrots and brisk lunch-hour walks to Tribeca and back.

  Fighting the panic attacks is a little more complicated. Sometimes I wonder what might set them off again.

  Being trapped underground in a packed subway car in a dark tunnel could very well do it.

  I try not to remember the old movie I once saw with my grandfather about a subway hijacking. The Taking of Pelham 123.

  I squeeze Jack’s hand, hard. He squeezes back.

  See, that’s the thing. I always know that he loves me, to the point where his mere presence is reassuring. Not just in this subway crisis (I know, but to me it’s a crisis)—but in my life. That’s why I want to know—need to know—that we’ll be together forever.

  Because I can’t imagine my life ever feeling normal again without him.

  Surely he feels the same way.

  Surely he’s ready to make that final commitment, wouldn’t ya think?

  The intercom interrupts my speculation, crackling loudly with a seemingly urgent announcement.

  The only words I think I can make out clearly are “grapefruit,” “Ricky Schroeder” and “explosive.”

  Or maybe I’m hearing them wrong.

  “What did they say?” I ask Jack.

  “Who knows?” he replies amid the disgruntled grumbling from similarly stumped commuters.

  Okay, I might not have heard grapefruit or Ricky Schroeder, but I’m pretty sure I heard the word explosive.

  I try not to think about terrorist attacks and suicide bombers.

  Yeah, you know how that goes. Terrorist attacks and suicide bombers are now all I can think about.

  In a matter of moments, I am convinced that this is no ordinary malfunction, but an Al Qaeda plot.

  We’re all going to die, right here, right now. And when we do, we won’t even be able to slump to the ground because we’re wedged against each other like hundreds of cocktail toothpicks in a full plastic container.

  I try to shift my weight, but succeed only slightly.

  Great. Now I’m going to die standing up with what I hope is somebody’s umbrella poking into my leg. As opposed to a penis or a gun.

  I try to shift my weight back in the opposite direction but that space has been filled. I can’t move.

  To add to the drama, from this spot, even in this dim light, I have a clear view of yet another Married People Live Longer ad.

  Dammit!

  I know it’s not as if all the married people on board the train will be sheltered from harm in a golden beam from heaven while the rest of us losers die a terrible death, but…

  Well, that stupid tag line isn’t helping matters. Not at all.

  Married People Live Longer.

  It might as well have said: Single People Die Young.

  My chest is getting tight and my forehead is breaking out into a cold sweat. This definitely feels like a panic attack.

  Mental note: place emergency call to Dr. Trixie Schwartzenbaum ASAP.

  I’m trapped. Oh, God, I can’t even breathe. There’s no air in here.

  Yes there is. Stop that. There’s plenty of air.

  I inhale.

  Exhale.

  See? Plenty of stale, stinky air to go around.

  “Come on!” shouts an angry voice in the dark.

  “This is bullshit!” somebody else announces.

  Another passenger throws in a colorful expletive for good measure.

  Then a woman speaks up. “That’s not helping.”

  “Shaddup!”

  In no time, a train full of civilized commuters has transformed into a vocal, angry mob. If there were more room, fistfights would be breaking out.

  “I can’t breathe,” I tell Jack.

  “Yes, you can,” he says calmly.

  “No, I can’t.”

  Verging on hysteria, I fantasize about shoving people aside and breaking a window.

  Two things stop me. The first is that it’s too crowded to get the leverage to shove anyone. The other is that I don’t have a window-breaking weapon in my purse.

  I guess I can always snatch the umbrella that’s still pressed up against my leg. If it’s an umbrella.

  If it’s not…

  Well, you definitely don’t want to grab a stranger’s penis in a situation like this.

  Then again, if it turns out to be a gun and not a penis, I can always shoot my way out.

  Then again, if it’s a gun, its owner might shoot me.

  The thing is, if it’s a gun, there’s a distinct possibility that any second now, he might go berserk and start shooting. Things like that happen all the time.

  Oh, God. I really can’t breathe.

  “Jack,” I say in a shrill whisper, “I’m scared.”

  “Why? It’s fine. We’re fine.”

  See, the thing is, that’s easy for him to say. He doesn’t know about the freak with the gun.

  “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 N
orth 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?