The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman by Barbara Silkstone Read Free Book Online

the guy sits down at our table. He compounds his mistake by telling us he’s a lawyer. I can feel Christa’s body tense-up.
    “More drinks!” she hails the waitress. I switch to club soda, and lawyer Mitch orders coffee. From out of nowhere, Christa begins to attack his profession, his gender, and his perceived lifestyle.
    “A lawyer? Hah! All crooks,” she says.
    “I’ll get the check,” I interrupt. Christa ignores me, thinking Mitch an easy victim. Mitch makes eye-contact with me. I figure Christa’s going down.
    The professional litigator takes a deep breath and swings his verbal sword over this head. “Lady, you’re in serious need of counseling.”
    Christa parries with a weak counter-crack. “You too.”
    Mitch deflects her shot, swings again, this time swooping lower. “The guy that damaged you did a good job. Was it daddy?” He strikes Christa in her most vulnerable spot.
    Stunned, she starts to cry.
    I secretly cheer for Mitch. Christa asked for every bit of this psychobabble. Ah, the savage singles. I knew there was a reason why I stayed away from these places. A diversionary tactic is needed. I use the only one I can think of, I pry Mitch off the scent of blood by telling him about my book.
    He appears to like the change of topic. “Hey, I’d give you a great interview. I’ve got some really strong opinions. I might piss you off.”
    “I may not look it, but I have been pissed off before. I expect it’ll happen again.”
    One week later, I find myself sitting at a conference table in the offices of one of the larger law firms in downtown Boston. It’s 7 p.m. and the building is deathly quiet. The panoramic windows offer a view of Boston and the harbor. I am supposed to be impressed. I am.
    This counselor’s a big man, about six four and slightly on the heavy side. All in all, he’s easy to look at. He wears an expensive suit and a tie with little law books all over it. I’ll bet he has the requisite red suspenders underneath his jacket.
    Mitch starts off defensively. I decide not to cut him any slack. “You’re forty-two and you’ve never been married, how come?” I check his dark brown eyes for a reaction.
    He leans back in his chair, smug. I notice the beginning of grey hair around his temples.
    “Men come with a certain number of inborn RAU’s,” he says, laughing at the expression on my face. “Oh, that’s ‘Running Around Units’. A man can’t marry before the RAU count drops below manageable terms. Guys who wait to get married are having too good a time, if they were honest about it.”
    He waits to be sure I’m following and then continues. “It’s like being in an amusement park with a tremendous number of rides. At different times you get to take a different woman on each ride. You might want to take one woman on ten rides or maybe twenty rides. You don’t risk as much, except health wise.
    “But it gets old. It reaches a point when instead of being excited about going on a date, it’s oh god, now I’ve got to get to know somebody else all over again. In years past, it was ‘Wow – how exciting – a first date.’”
    The lawyer watches how I process this little gem. He decides I can handle more. Mitch sees me as a professional, an equal. If he only knew I’m paddling as fast as I can to keep up.
    “Marriage is tough. It means different things to men and women. There are some women who want to stay at home and have kids and be June Cleaver. There are some women who want to be the wizard of Wall Street and probably most women want both and resent the juggling.”
    He stretches his long arms and moves his head first left then right with a slight cracking sound. “To me the most ironic part is that I know very few educated men my age who want their women to stay home and take care of the babies. They expect them to go out and work.”
    I say nothing. He waits.
    He gives up. “I feel very strongly about that. I would not marry anybody who would not work. And if