Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [44]
Not being too bright, I made the mistake of introducing Susan to Vivian so as to dispel the notion I sensed percolating in the latter’s jealous mind that there was anything going on between Susan and me. Vivian had started showing up at the park where Susan and I had our kickboxing sessions, and while I always pretended not to have seen her, I thought it would be a good idea to make a preemptive move before the jealousy got ugly. I made arrangements for us to meet at a bar around the corner from Susan’s office. We met during a happy hour, which failed to live up to its name. Susan brought along a nice-looking fellow named Jason, a nonentity in a business suit who seemed surprised to be alive. It didn’t take long before I realized I’d made a fatal mistake.
Susan and Vivian had liked one another about as much as the FBI likes the Mafia, maybe less so. They had nothing in common except their anatomy and the fact that each in her own way was beautiful. We were sitting at a small table with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and a candle as a centerpiece. I remember this aspect of the decor not because I’m romantic but because of the way their eyes glared in the flickering light. Almost immediately it became clear that they were looking for something to get nasty about, and needless to say they soon found a suitable subject: Chilean wine. I became the mediator while Jason did his imitation of the Invisible Man. I was so anxious to get out of the place that I paid the bill five minutes before the food appeared from the kitchen.
After that delightful evening, things begin to sour between Susan and me, and she cut her sessions from five to three, then to two, on down until it became every now and then. She let me know that she was dating Jason and had gotten into tennis. The training sessions became increasingly unpleasant and the cup protecting my balls increasingly necessary. I might be slow, but no one ever called me stupid, so I knew it had something to do with Vivian.
Maybe in some strange female way, she felt betrayed by the fact that I had a beautiful girlfriend, though I had spoken of her often enough—especially in the beginning when I was trying to convince my new emotionally labile client that she was relatively safe with me. Under those circumstances, even if Vivian hadn’t existed, I would have invented her for business purposes alone. Call it Machiavellian if you will; I call it public relations. It had been a way of neutering myself without having to undergo the actual surgery, and it had worked, too—at least until the two women sat down and went to war over the seemingly insane subject of Chilean wine.
Then, as frequently happens in my business, Susan disappeared from my calendar altogether, became a name consigned to the papery wings of my dog-eared Rolodex. The last time I heard from her, she had left her old job and joined a law firm and was now defending the same money-laundering drug dealers she’d previously been charged with putting in jail. As it turns out, the dealers had a lot more money, and, in the charade that is the war on drugs, no one at her old place of employment thought the worse of her for defecting. Inspector Ruben was now nothing more than a foolish face, fading fast in life’s rearview mirror. Jason had faded, too. She had a new man now, and things were, as they say, getting serious. There was no time for Jack, and I was made to understand that I, too, was part of the past. So long and thanks for the push-ups.
Now here I was, sitting across from her ex-husband, calling her at the office of one of Miami’s biggest law firms,