Free Boyfriend from Hell by Avery Corman Page A

came to the church when Ronnie was there, the peppy Sonya Brill. Why he would be given airtime was answered for Ronnie by the cloyingly friendly manner in which he was being interviewed. Cummings had made a pass at Ronnie, which he didn’t seem to expect would work. Something evidently worked there; Sonya Brill had ventured into the occult on a personal basis, Ronnie surmised. The woman was carrying on brightly as if Cummings were an actor in a newly released movie—it was great fun making it, we all had a good time on the set, and we hope the public will really, really like it.
    “And you feel people who join your cult are helped?”
    “Absolutely. We show results. People are looking for answers in these troubled times, and for many of them, we have the answers.”
    “And they tell you this?”
    For Ronnie it was starting to look like an infomercial.
    “Yes, they do. We don’t live in an especially moral society. All I’m doing is empowering the little guy with Satan.”
    Sonya Brill smiled at him warmly. Ronnie could have thrown a shoe at the television set, thinking here was a man who condoned, if he did not actually take part in himself, a series of stupid, loathsome acts designed to retaliate for an article Ronnie had written, and he was being given a forum for his self-promotion.
    “A recent article in New York magazine was somewhat critical of you and your cult, Mr. Cummings. Did you happen to see it?”
    “I glanced at it. The writer came with preconceived notions, a definite bias. Doing some dirty work to further her career.”
    The compliant Sonya Brill concluded the interview by allowing Cummings to plug his Web site along with the cult’s phone number.
    New York magazine accepted the Public Art Fund piece and during the editorial process the fact-checker double-checked a quote by calling Tony Weston, the artist Ronnie interviewed for the article. Weston used this as an opening to call Ronnie and invite her to dinner, leaving a message on her answering machine. Richard kept promising he would be back in New York, holding her off with brief, uninformative e-mails. Under house rules, if you didn’t sleep with more than one man at a time, did this apply to Richard, since Ronnie was still hard-pressed to define whether they were actually sleeping together? If a tree falls in the forest … How could you be sleeping with someone who wasn’t there, and if he were there, was he really there if he traveled this much?
    “Beats me,” Nancy said. They were eating dinner at home on a Monday night. “It has all the contours of just a pure sexual relationship.”
    “Or a sexual relationship with a married man.”
    “Think he’s married?”
    “Maybe. And he comes to New York on business.”
    “So then he’s a liar and an adulterer,” Nancy said.
    “He claims, no. But I’d like to be sure. You can’t have an affair with a married man.”
    “It has been done.”
    “It’s anti-feminist,” Ronnie said lightly.
    “Ah, I should have known that.”
    “What I seem to have here is an unreliable sexual relationship. The ‘unreliable’ is the relationship, not the sexual. You know, this is clarifying,” she teased. “I’ll give him a little more time. It’s not like he doesn’t e-mail me—every once in a while.”
    Richard finally called to say he was in New York, three weeks since New Orleans, nonchalant about the time lag, breezily telling her that he was very eager to get together, he had something exciting to tell her.
    “You’re getting a divorce.”
    “What? I’m not married, Ronnie. Where did you get that from? Can we have lunch tomorrow at Aureole? One o’clock. I’d say dinner, but I can’t wait.”
    “Lunch it is.”
    Proof of marriage, she supposed, was the marriage license, or commonly, the wedding ring. What was proof of not-marriage, the man’s word?
    He was waiting near the front door of the restaurant in his blazer and jeans.
    “Great to see you,” he said, kissing her. “I