post category variable depending on pages?

hi. i’m new to wordpress development – and loving it!

what i have is a site that is a pages/cms type site, ie no blog. i have a 2 column layout – text on the left, and image on the right.
currently i am using categories and the query_posts tag to place the images in the right hand side on each page. the problem with this is i have to have a category for each pages right hand side column.

what i would like to do is be able to use a variable(?) which will place the image (from the post) in the image column for each page automatically, without having to have all the categories.

is this possible? thx for any help in advance!

AG