Miss Match

by Leslie Carroll

  Kathryn placed her hands on either side of the teacup. “We shook hands, and I felt this warm red glow spread from my head to my toes and back again. And I’m sure he felt it, too, because he seemed distracted. So I tried a noble experiment and shook his hand again for no reason, except to re-cement the deal we’d just cemented, to see if I’d get the same sensation. And I did.”

  “So?”

  “So it doesn’t matter, because we sent me there to meet the guy who’s gonna say ‘I do’—and he doesn’t. Bear could be the greatest, smartest, hunkiest guy in the world, but by his own admission he suffers from terminal FOC.”

  “Huh?”

  Kathryn repeated her acronym. “FOC. Fear of Commitment. We’ve seen it before. An insidious disease that attacks the most desirable of the male species. Side effects are heartbreak and often anger in women who are residually affected by the affliction.”

  “Ummm.” Eleanor delicately dipped a cookie in her steaming tea, then brought it to her mouth and let it melt. “So, at least you’ve been warned. Cross the boss off your list before anxiety about him ensues. When do you get your first call?”

  “I have no idea. The men are supposed to call me and identify themselves as being clients of Six in the City.”

  Eleanor retrieved a lined yellow legal pad and a silver-plated Cross pen from one of the kitchen drawers. “When can you go shopping?”

  “For what?”

  “You dress like your students. We need to find you some serious dating clothes.”

  Kathryn tugged at her black leggings. “Any guy dating me for my wardrobe has got his priorities screwed up.”

  “Be that as it may, do you own anything in the category I just described?”

  “I’ve got a couple of classic Little Black Dresses, and more pairs of heels than Imelda Marcos, but I don’t exactly dress like that when I come over to visit you and Jo. I hate this neighborhood. I always feel like I have to pay to breathe the air, or that shopgirls are looking at me and thinking ‘fraud’ knowing I can’t really afford to buy anything in their boutiques when I pop in to browse. I’m definitely a Greenwich Village type. Boxy high-rises make me crazy.”

  “Excuse me, but the last time I checked, you lived in one of the few boxy high-rises in the West Village.”

  “Because the last time I checked, schoolteachers couldn’t afford one of those yummy, romantic townhouses with a garden. If I never saw glass and chrome again, I’d be a happy camper. There’s a brownstone on Bedford Street that is so drop-dead gorgeous that I stand in front of it and stare every day on my way home. The residents are starting to think I’m a stalker.”

  Eleanor fiddled with the pen, then twisted it open and wrote “lingerie” on the legal pad.

  Kathryn leaned over the table, her curls almost tumbling into the tea. “Lingerie? Isn’t that a bit ambitious? I haven’t even gotten the first phone call yet.”

  “Think of this as training lingerie. Practice wearing it; see how confident it makes you feel about yourself, then, when the time comes, you won’t feel self-conscious about wearing it anymore. It’ll be as much a part of your daily routine as that Tsarina bag you carry.”

  “Okay. Silk, satin, and lace. I’m certainly not opposed to the prospect. How does one do it on a Briarcliff salary?”

  “Think of me as your fairy godsister.”

  “I’m not going to let you pay for my underwear.”

  “Happy early birthday, then.”

  “That’s what I thought the dating service is. I distinctly remember you saying that you thought that’s what I needed in order to get back on the horse after the Lance debacle and get on with my life.” Kathryn took a swallow of her herbal tea and felt the liquid warming her throat. “I’m just not a hundred percent sure I trust the system, El. I still don’t like the idea of these guys knowing where I live. I mean, they’re total strangers. For all I know, they could be stalkers. I left my address blank on the application—although since I live in Bear’s mother’s high-rise, I guess that little secret’s out, because he obviously knows the address—but these guys will still get my phone number. I’d feel safer if someone I trusted, like Bear, did the calling, but I guess he can’t phone everyone to set up the dates, or he’d never get anything else done.”

  “So what’s Bear’s other problem, besides FOC?”

  “The other potential problem? I think he’s a bit of a klutz. Or accident prone.”

  “What?”

  Kathryn nibbled the edge of her Bordeaux cookie. “Unless he was nervous about talking to me. But I can’t fathom a reason why he would be, so I can only conclude that he’s a bit—well, oafish. Cute, but clumsy. In the space of ten minutes, he practically knocked over his Cornell University coffee mug and then he walked into his desk when he got up to say good-bye. Spending time with him could be a health risk.”

  “Maybe he just thinks you’re hot.” Eleanor winked at her older sister. “Ever thought of that?” The sisters got up to clear the tea things. “How’s school this year, by the way? I can’t believe Barton is still the principal. You would have thought they’d have put him out to pasture decades ago.”

  “They should have. He’s taken it into his head for me to assign the kids some stuffy old chestnut that they can’t relate to and which bored the hell out of them, when the seniors really want to do a musical. I’ve got a soprano with glorious top notes at the ripe old age of sixteen and a half, and I want to be able to use her. She makes Charlotte Church sound like a rank amateur.”

  “So what musical do you want to do?”

  “She Loves Me. It’s an old musical, by the same guys who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, but my students don’t know that. After reading the script about lonely-hearted pen pals who don’t realize that they’re actually coworkers who can’t stand each other by day, my kids think it’s a musical version of You’ve Got Mail.”

  “Isn’t it?” Eleanor sighed and donned two enormous quilted oven mitts. “Want to check on the jujube while I try to get these into the oven?” She surveyed her gestating Brownie Points.

  Kathryn tiptoed into Johanna’s blue-and-white-striped bedroom. The toddler was curled up, thumb safely ensconced in mouth, on her “big girl bed,” her arms around an enormous Winnie the Pooh and a well-loved rag doll version of Madeline. Kathryn fought the catch in her throat as she gazed at the sleeping child. Lately she had been feeling the first pangs ever of wanting one of her own.

  “Ever since we’ve been calling her the jujube, she’s taken to repeating it,” Eleanor whispered over Kathryn’s shoulder. “But it comes out like, ‘ju-bee, ju-bee.’ ”

  “Maybe she’s just getting ready to play Hamlet,” Kathryn joked. For some reason she didn’t want her younger sister to see her choking back a tear. “You know, ju-bee or not ju-bee. That is the question.”

  “I thought of you the other day, when she was fussing over a toy I took away, and I told her she was making much ado about nothing. She actually stopped and got quiet.”

  “Well, at least we know she can take direction,” Kathryn teased. “Which is more than I can say for my kids, who are more than a decade older than she is.” Kathryn headed for Eleanor’s hall closet, painted in trompe l’oeil, to look like part of the wall, and removed her brown velvet shrug.

  “Call me when you want to do underwear,” supermom said, as she kissed Kathryn good-bye. “Maybe we can get together and hit La Perla, then zip across town to Serendipity for the specialty of the house.”

  “Their frozen hot chocolate that comes in a bowl the size of a cauldron? Oh, that will help me keep my girlish figure. You’ve got a bun in the oven; you’re supposed to indulge at ice cream parlors. I have neither the same excuse, nor the same luxury. Although I really love those kitschy toys they sell up front—and they don’t have any calories.” Kathryn retrieved her purse and started to head for the door. “Bye! Give the jujube a kiss from Aunt Kittycat when she wakes up.” She rang for the elevator and sat down on the upholstered bench in the l
ittle hallway to wait for the elevator operator to bring the car to Eleanor’s floor.

  “Call me as soon as you hear from Bachelor Number One,” Eleanor said from the doorway.

  “And let me know how your culinary experiment turns out. In the meantime, I’ll try not to think too much about Bear Hart. I swear, on the way over here on the crosstown bus, I was doing a ‘sense memory,’ trying to recreate how it felt both times we shook hands, and I did it to myself. I made myself feel the same way again.”

  “I’m sure your fellow travelers were entertained.”

  “I guess I could sort of store that sensation up, and replay it in my mind whenever I’m feeling glum.”

  “Or you could just load up on Godiva. Look, there’s no reason you can’t be Bear’s friend, you know. Just keep focused on your priorities. But if you change your mind about him—or more to the point, if he changes his, remember: the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach—”

  “If you saw Bear in person, you’d see how true that is.” Kathryn raised an eyebrow archly. “He does impress me as a man who doesn’t forgo dessert.”

  “So bring him a Brownie Point.”

  The elevator ground to a halt at Eleanor’s landing. “Now that,” Kathryn said with a smile, “is a good suggestion.”

  Chapter 3

  Walker stood at the full-story windows of his mother’s penthouse, looking out at the view of the Hudson River. To the north, the sight wasn’t too spectacular, although on a clear day he could see all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. That kind of vista made Rushie a very popular woman whenever the Op-Sail parade of tall ships cruised into New York Harbor on the Fourth of July. The first night Walker moved in to house-sit for his mother while she jetted off on yet another honeymoon, he realized that he also had a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty to the south, in the immortal words of the Emma Lazarus poem, lifting “her lamp beside the golden door.” From the wraparound terrace the city glittered, illuminated as though millions upon millions of stars had fallen from the heavens upon the townhouses and tenements beneath.

  Maude Fixler herself, of Fixler & Crumb Realty, had sold Ruth Goldfarb Hart Haggerty Tobias Haggerty Aviles de Tournay Glendower the cooperative apartment, catering to Rushie’s fantasies to own an urban aerie—in a neighborhood where she could indulge her bohemian sensibilities and still feel like a Jewish Nora Charles. But almost as soon as the real estate closing was complete and Rushie had hired an interior designer, she was off on another trip to the altar. The major reason that Walker had agreed to watch over his mother’s swanky, professionally decorated penthouse was to get his own jollies fancying himself a modern day Cole Porter.

  The penthouse boasted only one piece of furniture that was his: the Steinway baby grand, which he had positioned on a carpeted platform at the far end of the living room so he could regale his friends with his renditions of Porter and Gershwin classics. The piano had cost him a bloody fortune to move from his sprawling acreage in suburban Connecticut—his welcome retreat from the frenetic singles bars along Second Avenue and the competitive, often arrogant men and women who inhabited the cutthroat world of dot-coms and blue chip companies that subscribed to The Hart Monitor. As long as he met his publishing deadlines he had the luxury of setting his own schedule, which meant that he could spend a generous amount of time in the pursuit of happiness if he so chose. Lately, he’d been thinking about becoming a country squire and taking up riding. He had plenty of land in which to stable and work his own horses. And it was nice to come home to a place where he could actually hear a bird sing every once in a while and, on a clear night, see more than the Big Dipper.

  But when Rushie had summoned him to preside over her domain, he’d sublet the Connecticut property on a month-to-month lease to a United Nations foreign diplomat and his family. No one ever knew precisely how long Rushie would be gone whenever she gallivanted off on one of her honeymoon jaunts, but given her penchant for lengthy honeymoons, Walker could expect to house-sit for her in Manhattan for at least a couple of months. His mother hated to leave her new nest unattended for any length of time, especially since the roof had been leaking. For Walker, an open-ended subtenancy in Rushie’s penthouse was far too long to be without his grand piano— his greatest source of solace. Besides, he hated the idea of a daily commute from Connecticut down to the Six in the City offices. So Mayflower Movers schlepped his Steinway, and Walker moved in to Rushie’s penthouse.

  He looked at the white south wall of the living room and frowned. Maude, in her Chanel suit and Bally spectator pumps, a blonde cross between a matriarch and a Machiavelli, had assured Rushie, with her realtor’s take-no-prisoners manner, that the wall would be repainted before the new Mme. De Tournay left town. True to her word, Ms. Fixler had indeed seen to it that the brownish rivulets, the residual effects of a problem on the roof— since repaired—were duly painted over. But the network of rust-colored capillaries running down the wall was still there, no doubt about it. Walker had inspected the apartment the day he moved in and could have sworn he didn’t remember seeing it.

  He padded across the pale champagne-colored carpet and ran his hand along the wall. Bone dry. At least that was a plus. Walker turned around and surveyed the living room. Smiling to himself, he shook his head. His mother knew absolutely nothing about interior design, but felt it a moral imperative to be perceived of as an expert, hence the highly recommended professional decorator. And true to Rushie’s form, she was nowhere to be found when it came time to actually make some decisions about colors, fabrics, mood, and style.

  The decorator, Sven, who seemed to have no last name and who showed up at Rushie’s penthouse wearing mulberry-colored skintight leather pants, was thrilled when he met Walker, whom Rushie had deputized to oversee her decorating. Attempting to size up his client’s taste, Sven suggested that Rushie might go for an overstuffed sofa upholstered by that “prince of chintz” Mario Buatta. Walker responded that he thought the man in question was the bullpen catcher for the Red Sox. Thus, Sven pegged him as a hopeless Martha Stewart surrogate. This gave Sven free reign.

  So, beige, beige, beige, was the color of the carpet, although Sven had referred to it as “brut champenoise”. Glass, chrome, and leather, with a few scattered animal prints were hauled in, arranged strictly according to Feng Shui, and the place now screamed “Rich Manhattan Bachelor,” rather than “Absentee Matchmaker.” And it didn’t feel like anybody’s home.

  Armed with his mother’s mandate and on the advice of Joshua Leo, an old Cornell fraternity brother of Bear’s who had inherited the Leo family art gallery in Soho, Walker purchased some works of art that Josh considered “important,” which meant that Walker could expect them to appreciate in value. The collection included a bronze statuette of a nymphlike maiden arching her back toward the heavens, and an original Warhol litho, which didn’t particularly excite him either, but at least it added a little color to the place. Sven, a card-carrying member of an animal rights group, refused to decorate any of his clients’ homes with real skins; so the zebra on the floor was the best “faux” money could buy, and the cheetah toss pillows were equally politically correct. Total cost was probably double the price of a weeklong safari on the Serengeti.

  Window treatments. He laughed to himself. Why did his mother want Austrian shades, whatever they were? Besides, why would anyone want to obstruct the view of the river? The water was mesmerizing in any light. Who was going to look in—some nut in New Jersey with a telescope?

  Walker picked up his black portable phone and dialed a number.

  “Leo Galleries. How may I help you.”

  “I’d like a Picasso and a six-pack delivered by nine P.M.”

  “Bear! How’re you doing? I’ve got customers, can I call you back?”

  “Sure, Josh. I was bored and didn’t like the idea of watching Monday Night Football alone.”

  “No dates?”

  “Don’t want one.”

  “You don’
t want a wife. I’ve never known you not to practice connubial comfort with a nonwifely candidate. Gotta go, bro. See you at eight forty-five. Get some food this time.”

  Walker slid the antenna down and placed the phone on the smoked glass coffee table shaped sort of like a water trap on the twelfth hole. He retrieved a stack of take-out menus from a drawer in the kitchen and perused a couple. Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Afghan, Italian, comfort food, pizza. A wealth of choices and no recommendations to go on. He tossed out the menus from restaurants that were more than ten blocks away. No way take-out could get to your door from over a half mile away and not be either soggy or cold.

  He peeked into the fridge, half expecting some food to have mysteriously appeared when he hadn’t been looking, but there was only the bachelor’s staple: a bottle of champagne. This one was Taittinger. Checking the freezer, he found a bottle of Stoli and a package of frozen egg rolls.

  Walker never cooked for himself. Eating was a social experience as far as he was concerned, and therefore he did it only socially: when he was taking a woman on a date, or entertaining someone at home—usually Josh, who would come up to Connecticut on the commuter train—and they had guy meals, like pizza and beer.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d been feeling so restless lately. Maybe he was stuck in a rut. He certainly didn’t dislike his lifestyle. He had more money than anyone had a right to wish for, though it wasn’t the be-all and end-all, and the responsibilities of The Hart Monitor allowed him to set his own hours, therefore giving him the ability to manage— temporarily—his mother’s abandoned business. There was never a shortage of women, but no one lately had really blown his circuits. Thank heaven he had eclectic interests. He was just as happy at a football game as he was at a concert. He liked his beer, and when he’d dated a woman named Talia, he’d even developed a taste for classical dance because she was in the corps of the New York City ballet. But Talia, even out of her pink satin pointe shoes, turned out to be extremely flighty and floaty. She was also a devout vegan who lectured him every time he ate a cheeseburger, wore clothing made exclusively of textiles where the fiber was grown organically—and to top it off, was more infatuated with herself than with him. What was it about dancers and mirrors?