Chapter Four: Gimmicks The Phone Companies Use To Rack Up Your Bill

I reached the point at which I looked back at my time with Jimmy and could have sworn he was faking his orgasms (how? by spitting on my back?) and wondered when he could have found time to meet someone else, for that had to be the only reasonable explanation: he had been wooed away by another woman, and, although strangely, I wished her no harm, I wanted her to hurt him viciously.

She would dump him callously, preferably for a better-looking, smarter and funnier man, younger and with more hair, leaving him distraught and forlorn, at which point he would come to his senses and realize that I had been the perfect woman for him all along. He had to be made to suffer.

Despite the fact that none of my friends would tell him my new address or phone number (not that he asked for it), I invested in a Caller ID box, and each time I turned the key in the latch, my heart raced in case I should find the light blinking. When it did, it was usually the Police Benevolent Society or some random cell phone number, whose owner had left a message for Carlos in Spanish. I once tried to return the call as a gesture of goodwill to explain that Carlos would never hear the message, since I had never heard of Carlos, but I was called a “puta” and halted any attempt at phone etiquette from that day on.

I actually got irritated when people who were NOT Jimmy called me. They were tying up my line! I added Call Waiting to my list of services, and many a friend was silenced when they heard a little click.

“Hold on!” I would yell gaily. “I have another call!”

For some reason, I never figured out if my Caller ID box would show an incoming number if I happened to be on the phone already, so I lived in a state of perpetual anticipation in case this was The Jimmy Call, the one I was waiting for.

Then there were those calls that registered “Out of Area” on my ID box with no message. I learnt the #69 trick and called all manner of erroneous dialers with reckless abandon and little concern for their patience or my phone bill, which was soaring with every new service added.

And still he never called.

This compulsive behavior might be perfectly acceptable in a seventeen-year-old girl when the football hero dumps her a week after the prom. But for a thirty-something woman to continue this pattern over a two year period after the “let’s hang out, I’ll call you” conversation, the result was nothing short of pathetic. What sort of loser was I that I would even want a man like this back in my life?

The answer, clearly, was this: a loser in love.