Side Of The Angels

Chapter One My cousin Louise and I ate lunch together twice a month at her office, no fail. That's what we were doing the first Wednesday in November when my boss's call came, the one that threw Tony and me, if not back into each other's arms, into each other's orbit. Don't you love it when life suddenly behaves like a movie? There we were, Louise and I, speaking of a man I'd just left not Tony, another man and I was on the verge of remarking to Louise, "At least I'm not the mess I was after Tony," when the phone rang. Tony was my old flame, the man who got away. The man whose getting away had so thrown me off my game that I'd fallen into a series of stupid romances, the most recent of which was a three-year-long involvement with Jeremy, a self-enamored British expatriate who'd been cheating on me for six months before I discovered it and kicked him out on his tweedy, two-timing ass. "The thing about Jeremy," Louise had commented a little earlier as she laid out some pink linen napkins and secondhand china (Louise likes to beautify even a weekday lunch), "is that he's the kind of man who's never happy unless he's exercising his talent for persuasion. Which makes a day-to-day relationship difficult, unless you have some strange arrangement where you pretend you're dumping him every other week, or you wear different wigs to bed, or costumes." "I would say I was playful in bed," I said defensively. "I read articles and stuff. Once in a while." "I'm not faulting you, Nicky. You could dress up in a lion tamer's outfit one night and a French maid's the next and it wouldn't be enough for Jeremy." Louise had never liked Jeremy. Suave, educated, well-spoken types held no charm for her. She preferred her men artistic, tortured, and generally unbathed. Though perhaps she discouraged Jeremy's potential reemergence because she wanted to try her hand at digging up prospects for me. Louise is a professional matchmaker, a harebrained occupation at which she's surprisingly successful. She'd always wanted a shot at seeing what she could do for me. Like a temperance worker with a tippler in the family, she was frustrated that her dedication and devotion to the cause were of no use to her own kin. "My trouble is, Louise, I can never spot Jeremy's kind until he's stomped on my feelings so badly I don't want him anymore." "Which, of course, makes him come after you with renewed interest. Look at how he's acting now, like you're the Holy Grail. Where was all that appreciation these past three years?" Jeremy had been doing his best his persuasive, most grandly romantic best to get me to give him a second chance. I'd dumped him in July. Needless to say, time had not yet dulled the wound. Louise's phone rang. We let the machine pick it up she still has one of those old-fashioned manual answering machines, now considered as primitive as long-playing records. "Nicky," came Ron's voice through the static, "I know you said not to bother you, but this is important. Call me." It was always important. Ron liked to pretend he lived in an atmosphere of crisis. He was an ardent fan of those medical dramas where the doctor races through the hospital corridor shouting angrily, "Get me a CBC on that kid, stat." Ron wished with all his meager, little heart that he could someday say "Stat." Unfortunately, there wasn't much call for that sort of thing when you headed a second-rate PR firm that specialized in hopeless causes. Not only was Ron's firm second-rate, so was his taste in names. He had christened his business "Advocacy, Inc." despite all my persuasions. I cringed whenever I glanced at our letterhead. Ron clicked off. Then the phone rang again. If Ron applied only half the single-minded devotion to his clueless, charity-bent clients that he did to getting his own way, how much better offBartolomeo, Christina is the author of 'Side Of The Angels', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312323660 and ISBN 0312323662.