mimi visits 2 more matchmakers
Impossible!
That’s what mm3 [abbreviation henceforth for matchmaker] had written at the top of her page of notes on me; I saw the word, and it was unmistakable, when she turned the page over to begin writing on the back.
‘Does that mean you don’t think you can find anyone for me?’ I asked.
‘Oh! No, it just means it will be challenging!’
When she flipped the piece of paper back again, I saw that she had added Challenging! after Impossible!
I wasn’t sure what to think.
She was my second matchmaker of the afternoon, and my third in the last week.
* * *
After a few days spent mulling over Max, the man with the pile of dirty laundry who thought it was odd to care what a potential date thought about Guantanamo Bay and crazy to walk up twenty-three flights of stairs with a date afraid of elevators — after that, I decided to get in touch with more matchmakers.
Why not? If the task of finding me a match was going to be daunting and difficult, maybe it would take three people to do it.
I did more web research and made more appointments.
* * *
Leah, mm2, was young and pleasant. She shared a reception area in a midtown office building with other businesses, though what they were I couldn’t tell. As I waited for her, a scruffy man in a leather jacket was
seated on a small sofa next to a frazzled-looking skinny woman with long, pale hair, receiving wads of hundred-dollar bills from her. Although it was easy to overhear their conversation — I was on a chair right next to them — I couldn’t figure out what the deal was or what business they were in, though something the woman said made me think it might be entertainment. Neither of them seemed the slightest bit concerned that this cash transaction, lots and lots of large bills passed from a large decorated white envelope into the man’s hands, was open and visible.
Leah, it turned out, only made matches for people in their 20s and 30s, but she did the interviewing for a larger firm that included sexagenarians among their clientele. As their front woman, Leah had to get the feel of who I was and lead me through an eight-page questionnaire with questions like the following:
art yes no
museums yes no
ballet yes no
opera yes no
theater yes no
music yes no classical country oldies opera gospel folk jazz big band rock pop new age easy listening
I circled YES for everything and wrote in large letters in the margin,FILM very important. the man must want to go to films.
Stupid, I said to myself; stupid me, stupid them.
Page five included the following:
HOBBIES - SPORTS — ACTIVITIES
golf tennis boating antiquing casino gambling sight-seeing people-watching swimming snorkeling fishing hunting horseback riding walking jogging working out gourmet cooking spectator sorts movies tv gardening dancing biking bridge shopping fine dining skiing collecting
Forms like that bring out the perverse in me (not hard to do….): why was the category ‘movies’ included with ’snorkeling’ and ‘casino gambling’ rather than with opera and ballet? and why only gourmet cooking and fine dining? what about people (like me) who live most of the time on Stoneyfield yogurt? and what about people who like McDonald’s small fries?
Bother! as Winnie the Pooh would have said to this list.
I drew a large X through the entire list and wrote, man must be in good shape and like to walk on cement.
‘Is that legible?’ I asked Leah, whose job was to lean over my shoulder as I wrote.
‘Walk on cement…,’ she read slowly. ‘Yes, I can read it.’
On page six, I lost it: for the category Pet Peeve (a term that reminded me of pre-teen magazines from the 1950s), I wrote in the answer, ‘forms like this one.’
* * *
‘They’ll reject me,’ I said to Leah, with whom I had bonded, because she good-naturedly laughed at every impatient comment I made about the form. It wasn’t her form, anyway: it would be sent to the sexagenarian wing of the business.
‘No they won’t,’ she said encouragingly, telling me stories of her parents and their different tastes as I said I didn’t care whether the man I met snorkelled or liked Big Band music, but he must believe that Guantanamo Bay was a place of torture and humiliation.
Leah smiled patiently, telling me that one parent was a Republican and one a Democrat.
‘That works for some people,’ I said, ‘but this is important to me. It’s like a religious conviction.’
* * *
Question 12. Anything else you would like to share with us about yourself?
My answer:
Yes. I’m 60, but I’m a young 60. I’m eccentric/ unconventional/iconoclastic/very funny / irreverent. I hate the war in Iraq. I think Guantanamo Bay is an outrage. Will not date anyone who thinks otherwise. In spite of political convictions, I’m actually fun to be w/ and love to go out and enjoy myself.
Bleghghghgh!
Dumb questionnaire.
Leah was nice, but she would not be picking the men for me.
Oh well, there was no charge for the interview. The charge would come with the men, if they ever managed to find any for me.
*******
MM3, the one who wrote Impossible! on her legal pad, had a home office considerably more elegant than Max’s. Betsy’s view was even better than his (she was on the 40th floor), her window more sweeping, her living room much, much larger. No dirty laundry here: porcelain vases and non-representational sculptures were placed tastefully and strategically around the room.
Betsy was about my age, maybe a bit younger, and it was easy to be direct with her. In the photographs she had looked overpoweringly attractive and stylish, but as I sat there talking with her (her sofa wasn’t as low as Max’s, and she didn’t say ‘make yourself comfortable’), I began to feel that I looked good enough to win her approval.
She took in ‘who I was’ and what I was like, and after half an hour, she said, ‘You’re going to need a very smart man.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’
Then, pointing at me, speaking as if suddenly enlightened, she said, ‘You’re an Intellectual.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I felt the force of that single-word as response to her analysis of me.
* * *
‘Sex, the physical, is important for you,’ she said a little later.
‘Isn’t it for everyone?’
‘No.’
‘How could that be?’
‘I get women coming in here who’ve been in very rough marriages; they just want men who are gentle and kind.’
‘Well of course I want that too, but I thought it goes without saying.’ I really felt like saying ca va sans dire, but it was not the right social occasion to use it, though it was precisely the right rhetorical occasion.
Betsy and I — I was beginning to bond with her, too — talked about the attractiveness of short men v. same of tall men, the value of shoulders, the general look of the man. She read her notes back to me: ‘he should be about 5′10 , broad shoulders, a Democrat, a professional –’
I began to feel I had made too many demands.
‘He doesn’t need to look like a movie star. He just needs to be decent-looking.’
‘Presentable.’
‘Yes. Presentable.’
* * *
My hour was up. Betsy was very businesslike, keeping me to sixty minutes exactly. That was fine with me. Like Leah, she seemed to have ‘gotten’ me, sized me up, figured out the kind of man she thought I wanted, and determined that the task ahead was ‘challenging’ but perhaps not ‘impossible.’
She never offered her hand to shake, but we said a pleasant good-bye. Four-hundred dollars for the interview, and more if an eligible match ever turned up.
* * *
And that, Dear Reader, in this year 2007 — with ipods and oil-wars and a woman and an African-American running for president and plasma screens in half of American living rooms and pat-down searches in airports and strawberries all year round and groceries that come through the internet and peace in Northern Ireland and the price of a diet-coke almost $2 everywhere and women soon to outnumber men in law schools and giant tornadoes and so many many phenomena that people even fifteen years ago would never have dreamed of — that, Dear Reader, is what it’s like to visit a matchmaker.
