*
Away from the office, my guy friends laughed at me. They saw it as my just desserts, losing my promotion to someone like Zoey Schoenberg.
"How many little hotties have you screwed this year, Aide? High time one of them screwed you back."
"Thanks, Robin. Thanks for your support."
As far as they were concerned, it was sweet revenge for all those times I went home with a gorgeous girl itching to get naked, while my friends went home to an empty bed - or worse, to a peeved girlfriend or sour-faced wife waiting with arms folded and lips pouting around what-time-do-you-call-this questions.
The wives and girlfriends in our circle weren't impressed by my new boss either, or what I told them of her. When we were out with them - perhaps for dinner or a house party, or a celebratory drink or two in a nice bar - they always turned my moaning into evidence I basically needed to find the right woman, settle down, start doing what they were doing in life. Work to live, not the other way around.
My married friends seemed constantly obligated to peddle me the whole commitment line, but mixed within it was this strange idea about finding someone to take over my life. Give up control. They weren't even subtle about it.
"You need a bit of female leadership in your life, Aide," Marty Williams would usually tell me over a few drinks of an evening, always linking in my office gripes to my complete inability to hold down a relationship for longer than three months. "It can't be healthy having everything your own way. You never heard of Karma?"
"So I should just settle down and stop having sex like you?"
"There's benefits," he'd say, and then his whole argument would evaporate as a single text from his wife made him suddenly stand up and apologize before grabbing his coat to flee the scene.
God, how could you live like that? At the beck and call of some woman at home. A butler, only unpaid.
Vic Rennie, on the other hand, liked to live vicariously though my social life, so his advice to me was to look on the bright side.
"Work sucks," he said. "Everyone knows that - fuck it. Go out and enjoy yourself outside the office - stop focusing on work so much. Let the bitch rot in her high-and-mighty job. Forget about it - focus on the tail."
"Tail?" On that occasion, his wife Rona happened to overhear his advice. I saw Vic blush like a schoolgirl, and found myself wondering how our stud college linebacker had found himself so completely powerless like this.
"Tale - T-A-L-E," he said, spelling it out, resorting to a homophone of all things to get him out of trouble. "Aide's been writing a novel for ages." With Rona behind his back, Vic offered me a pleading look to back him up in his little white lie.
"I keep getting stuck with it," I said, much to the guy's relief. "I'm not sure I'm much of a writer." I did have an ounce or two of mercy in my soul when it came to people I felt deserved it. But I was thinking: how had Vic come to live in terror of the woman he'd chosen to spend the rest of his life with? How did that decision get made?
This was a man who used to regularly shove through three hundred pound buffalo to blitz the quarterback, and not think anything of it.
"You know your problem, Aiden?" Rona would say, and at least to start with I'd always remain dutifully calm and listen, though I knew exactly what she was going to say. "You always go for dippy little blondes that never answer back and do everything you say."
"Isn't that the perfect kind?"
"No wonder you get bored after one night."
"It's not that I'm bored, Rona - it's just there's so many dippy little blondes out there…"
I'd get a wry grin from Vic and a full eye-roll and sigh from Rona, but underneath it all, even I had to admit she had at least half a point. My dates were all pleasing to look at - but deathly dull. And increasingly these days, I was finding it harder to do the whole one night stand thing and get out alive. Girls gunning for guys of my age were generally of the opinion I was maturing enough to be looking for commitment. It was something of which I took full advantage when picking them up - but it got harder and harder to come away with dignity when I suggested this simply wasn't going to work out.
Or when I snuck out of their apartments in the dark, leaving them sleeping peacefully in their beds, dreaming about what we were going to call our kids.
Anyhow, my dating etiquette aside, even Rona and Marty's wife, Tasha, were oddly supportive of my stubborn strategy of quiet resistance and noncooperation in the office, both of the opinion that I should have got the VP job.
"You should give her a hard time," Tasha had even suggested. "She's got to earn the respect of her team."