Should I start my column by ordering them by age?
Well, another number has always counted more in my selection of men: their income.

To be fair, I’ll start from a middle case: Mr. Middle Age Middle Income.
We are in Los Angeles, so middle age has to be read thirty-five and middle income means sixty thousand a year, two cars including a sport BMW and a house in Bel Air.

One evening two girlfriends of mine, a broke writer of Angeleno Magazine and a broke ballerina of the Los Angeles Ballet, call me from a party at the Woman’s Bay Club in Santa Monica.
It’s a fund raising for an independent movie and, since they’ve looked into their pockets and found no funds to raise but really need a free dinner, they think that by adding a third pretty and broke to the table their embarrassment will be half sized.
I’m sure they never excelled in math at school because, pretty soon, our discomfort has increased so much that we’re moving our three shy asses down the stairs.

That’s when a dreaming Mr. Middle Age Middle Income makes his entrance. An entrance that takes my breath away.
As if the gaffes for the night haven’t been already enough, we rush back to the seats we’ve just left.
And we set up a few cheap tricks to attract him to our table.

He comes over interesting, different and crazy attractive.
After a brief chat mainly about the reasons he is there – he is a costume designer for movies – right before leaving he gives me an unforgettable look and his business card to each one of us.

That’s how it started. Well, that’s how I started.
Since I do not find a better way to see him again, I decide to use his business card and write him an e-mail.
After all, how can he contact me, if he didn’t ask my number?

He writes back and invites me out to dinner at BOA.
Too bad it’s Saturday night and he has forgot to make a reservation, so I have to secretly hand my last hundred bucks to the hostess to get to know my Mr. Middle Age Middle Income in front of a steak that I won’t even eat, since I’m vegetarian.

A few months go by and I get to the point to leave him because I’m still the leading force of our encounters – and, I’m tired of it.
We go up to the Huntley Hotel Penthouse for a drink and, overlooking the sunset on the ocean, I explain him that the male part is not really adapted to a tall, thin, blonde female Russian model. So, bye bye boy.

That’s when he comes out with the story of “the sacred and the scared.”
Scared – that’s him: scared of my beauty, scared of my rejection, scared that I would leave him.
Sacred – that’s the card. He proudly asks me to compare the card he gave me to the one he gave my two girlfriends. He says mine was laminated and graced by the image of the most beautiful angel he ever drawn; that angel is actually hanging on the walls of the Vatican, as of today.
My two girlfriends, instead, got the plain card he uses for his Hollywood meetings with square-minded, dry-soul studio producers.

Everything had been planned. He chose me, despite of what I’ve been thinking; despite of the reason I want to leaving him for.
So, he suggests to call my two girlfriends right now just to prove it.

But, you know what?
1) if not for me, you would have never come to our table.
2) if not for me, you would have never called first.
3) if not for me, we would have never had our first date at BOA on a Saturday night.

So, if you didn’t notice yet, I’ve trumped your card a long time ago!

Story by Irina Svistunova.