The Side of the Angels Read Online Free

Louise’s offer, though. I was still bewildered, still wondering how I’d been so unsuspicious. Jeremy had cheated on me with Virginia Sprague, the head of admissions at Laurel Hill, the girls’ college on Boxwood Road where he taught modern world history and was far too spoiled with attention and admiration. Laurel Hill was a glorified finishing school for not-too-intellectual young women ofgood family, and Jeremy was a star on its underachieving faculty. It’s not good for a man like Jeremy to be too long in a place where he’s top dog. He starts thinking he can get away with anything.
    I’d met his honey once at a department dinner party. Virginia was cool and poised, gracious but not friendly, a forty-year-old divorcée from Charleston with a lilting Carolina accent that recalled Civil War love letters. It was funny, how she’d never lost that accent after ten years in D.C.
    â€œVirginia is nice, but she’s not very warm, is she?” I remembered saying to Jeremy after that dinner party. Virginia had wafted in during the second round of cocktails, wearing a lilac organza blouse so fragile and expensive that only a woman who never, ever spilled or tripped would be confident enough to purchase it.
    â€œShe’s very closed off, isn’t she?” he’d agreed. “It’s quite unattractive.” By which I should have known he found her very appealing. Men make those immediate denials of interest solely about women who do, in fact, interest them intensely.
    Maybe it was that voice, sweet and cool as the wisteria-shaded corner of a veranda on a hot summer afternoon. Or her often-silent self-containment, so challenging to a man like Jeremy, to whom women presented confidences and confessions like bouquets. Or maybe she’d simply wandered into his enclosure just as he started to feel restless.
    Now, listening to Louise extol the virtues of a fresh start, I wondered at her faith in happy endings. I’d thought Jeremy was trustworthy. I’d thought we had something good going on, something that merited his keeping his pants zipped up at the office. What accounted for Jeremy’s straying? And what was so great about Virginia, with her outdated Grace Kelly pageboy and her cultured pearls?
    â€œWhat about the process?” I asked Louise.
    â€œYou don’t have to go through the process. I know you well enough, don’t I?”
    She poured me more coffee, her own special almond-hazelnut blend (she uses hazelnut coffee and pours a tablespoon of almond extract on top before brewing).
    Before she sent you out on your first date, Louise cataloged your romantic history, asked you to write down your dreams for a week, andmade a genogram of your extended family to pinpoint any possible “intimacy roadblocks.” If something in your past or present was getting in the way of your finding a lifetime partner, Louise would discover it faster than a drug-sniffing canine at the Miami airport sussing out a cocaine stash in a duffel bag.
    Not to worry—if you
were
a subconsciously reluctant lover, Louise guided you through a free monthlong “unblocking” course, with personalized prescriptions for opening yourself up to love. These ranged from juice fasting to singing lessons to spending a weekend alone in a mountain cabin “to fall in love with yourself first.” Louise even led rituals for saying farewell to past loves, in which souvenirs of the unfaithful departed were burned, buried, or, in one case she told me about, spat upon. “Nothing else really seemed to express how she felt,” Louise said. “It was incredibly cathartic.”
    On the rare occasions when a client left in dissatisfaction or gave up after encountering disappointment, Louise mourned for weeks. Once in a while she’d confide in me about a particularly difficult problem. I felt honored and pleased when she did that. It meant that Louise knew that underneath