Angels Read Free

we'd been kind of depending on Liam and Elaine to dilute the funny atmosphere between us.
    “You just missed Donna,” he said. “She'll call you at work tomorrow.”
    “So what's the latest?” Donna had a messy, high-concept love life and, as one of her best friends, I felt it was my duty to provide advice. But she often consulted Garv to get what she called “the male perspective,” and he was so helpful that she'd rechristened him Dr. Love.
    “Robbie wants her to stop shaving under her arms. Says he thinks it's sexy, but she's afraid she'll look like a gorilla.”
    “So what did you advise?”
    “That there's nothing wrong with women having hair—”
    “Right on, sister.”
    “—but that if she really doesn't want it, she should say that she'll stop shaving under her arms if he'll start wearing girls' panties.
    What's good for the goose and all that.”
    “You're a genius, you really are.”
    “Thanks.”
    Garv pulled off his tie, flung it over the back of a chair, then raked his fingers through his hair, shaking away the vestiges of his work persona. For the office his hair was Ivy League neat: sleeked back off his face and shorn close at the neck, but off duty, it flopped down over his forehead.
    There are some men who are so good-looking that meeting them is like being hit on the head with a mallet. Garv isn't one of them; he's more the sort of man you could see 12 / MARIAN KEYES
    day in, day out, for twenty years, then just wake up one morning and think, “God, he's nice, how come I never noticed him before now?”
    His most obvious attraction was his height. But I was tall too, so I'd never gone around saying, “Ooh, look at how he towers over me!” All the same, I was able to wear heels with him, which I appreciated—my sister Claire had been married to a man who was the same height as she was so she had to wear flats in order that he not feel inadequate. And she really loves shoes.
    But then Claire's husband had an affair and left her, so everything works out for the best in the end, I suppose.
    “How was work?” Garv asked.
    “Mostly awful. How was yours?”
    “Bad for most of the day. I had a nice ten minutes between four-fifteen and four twenty-five when I stood on the fire escape and pretended I still smoked.”
    Garv works as an actuary, which makes him a cheap target for accusations of being boring—and on first meeting him you might confuse his quietness with dullness. But in my opinion it's a mistake to equate number crunching with being boring; one of the most boring men I ever met was this idiot novelist boyfriend of Donna's.
    We went out for dinner one night and he BORED us into the ground. Loudly monologuing about other writers and what overpaid, meretricious bastards they were; then he began questioning me about how I'd felt about something or other, probing and delving with the intimacy of a gynecologist. “How did you feel?
    Sad? Can you be more specific? Heartbroken? Now we're getting someplace.” Then he hurried to the men's room and I just knew that he was writing everything I'd said into a notebook, to use in his novel.
    “You're not to be jealous about Liam's flat-screen telly,” I said to Garv, happy to pretend that his subdued mood was on account of his mate having more consumer durables than he did. “Did it attack him? It might have to be put down.”

    ANGELS / 13
    “Ah.” Garv shrugged the way he always does when he's bothered.
    “I'm not bothered.”
    (Though happy to discuss Donna's problems with her, you'll note his reluctance to talk about his own feelings, even when they're only about a telly.)
    “But do you know how much it cost?” he blurted out.
    Of course I knew. Every time I went into town with Garv we had to stop at the electronics department in Brown Thomas and stand before said telly, admiring it in all its twelve thousand pounds'
    worth of glory. Though Garv was well paid, he didn't earn anything like Liam's telephone-number chunk. And between