Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  Natasha Ivanova did not have a police record.

  Well, they’d gotten that right at the trial. I was almost disappointed.

  She does have one incident that was expunged from the official record, but it doesn’t amount to much. She was stopped for a traffic violation and got into an altercation with the arresting officer.

  She hit him with her shoe.

  The charges were later dropped in exchange for an apology.

  She made a substantial donation to the Police Benevolent Society in the same year.

  I bet it killed him to tell me that. My eyes skipped down the page.

  …find this interesting. There were allegations of fraud last year. The IRS is conducting ongoing investigations as well. Nothing specific was noted or proved, so it wouldn’t have come up in the trial.

  The tip-off was anonymous.

  Like the phone call after the murder.

  The tipster alleged that she had ties to the Moscow underworld, but nothing concrete ever surfaced. Tommy had written above this line: Don’t get too excited about this. We hear this kind of stuff all the time. A lot of people just don’t like “Russians,” and the “Mafia” connection is an easy accusation to make and a hard one to prove one way or the other. At least that’s what I think he said. There were holes in the paper where he’d jabbed it with the pen.

  At the end of the report, after the date of birth and social security information and the marital status (single) sheet, he’d written: I’ve saved the best for last. Natasha Ivanova came to this country in 1990, but she wasn’t an aristocrat at all. She wasn’t even Russian.

  She was a Bulgarian Gypsy.

  Articles (such as they are) attached.

  Wow! I loved it! A Bulgarian Gypsy! My knowledge of Bulgaria was admittedly limited—I pictured it as a kind of gray place where people went around in stained raincoats poking each other with poisoned umbrella tips—but I guessed it conferred no cachet as a place of origin. Natasha the Gypsy girl had invented a whole new identity for herself, making herself over into a Russian aristocrat or some sort of reasonable facsimile. Since I was about to undertake a minor version of the same transformation, I couldn’t really knock her for it, but I was definitely intrigued.

  I looked at the clippings. One of them showed her in a zookeeper’s outfit (tan pants and safari shirt, by the looks of it, with the zoo logo stitched over the pocket) and a pith helmet, standing next to the Siberian yellow-throated martens’ cage and smiling bravely. She looked intensely uncomfortable. She didn’t look like a sinister underworld figure, or like Anastasia, either, for that matter. She looked more like someone dressed for the school play, who’d suddenly forgotten her lines. “Matchmaking Maven Meets Moscow Martens,” the headline read. People go to journalism school to learn to write like that.

  There were no other pictures, just a couple of short articles about charity events and one small announcement of the opening of Ivanova Associates in their new building. Like her clients, she was apparently not big on publicity.

  Tommy had appended a separate page, with a note to me:

  I’m not sure if this is what you wanted, Ellen. Sorry there isn’t any more.

  I’m really sorry about upsetting you when you came to the house. I should have thought before I told you. It seems like we hurt each other whether we mean to or not.

  I don’t think you should call me again for a while. I need to think this through, and so do you, before we get involved in each other’s lives. I need some time. Let me contact you first.

  Please honor my request.

  My brother’s resistance to my importunings for a closer relationship was not without its ironies. He was raised as part of a culture that places family first and individuals second, while I spent a lonely Protestant childhood plotting my escape. I excelled in self-reliance and autonomy; kinship connections were manifestly a dead end. Now I was hounding him to be let into the inner circle. I wondered what he felt, nurtured on the diet of respect for tradition and the ethic of reciprocal responsibility. It was clear that my mother’s rejection of him and his of her might screw him up. Had screwed him up. Had screwed both of us up.

  He might have had his doubts about his role as my brother, but he had none whatsoever about acting the policeman. He’d added a scrawled postscript at the bottom of the page.

  After looking at this material, if I were you, I would talk to the kid (the felon). You could probably arrange this though his mother.

  A few lines farther down, he wrote:

  Be Careful.

  Kathleen Wyndham gave me an intense stare from across the teapot she was holding. Despite the tea, the Stately Home name, and an accent hovering tantalizingly mid-Atlantic, she was even less likely to be a natural at Buckingham Palace garden parties than I was. She was more like some exotic tropical flower—all bright colors and exuberant flamboyance—except that flowers were delicate, and Kathleen was anything but. She was nearly six feet tall and built like an Amazon. Her hair and eyes were very dark. Her look was piercing, like the Mad Squirrel’s, and it was fixed on me.

  I wasn’t going to get away with assuaging her with a peanut.

  In front of her, on the table, was a sheaf of papers, my answers, short and long, to a battery of questions about my background, my likes and dislikes. The receptionist had assured me that they would be scrutinized by a psychologist and a handwriting expert “before you go any further.” I’d also submitted the name of my physician, a release that would allow her to confirm that I was lacking in communicable diseases, and the financial references Jeff had supplied me with.

  Now I was sitting nervously, ushered at last into the Principal’s Office to hear my fate. The receptionist had told me the company employed an image consultant to help clients with “little problems.” I wondered what counted as easily fixable.

  Ms. Wyndham still had not spoken since her perusal of my information, and I was starting to feel a little paranoid. I was also having trouble fending off a fit of the giggles, which I was fairly sure would not be considered Top-Drawer behavior. Finally, she said, “We have an investigator to check for felonies.” Her eyes did not leave my face.

  I had to hold the swallow of tea in my mouth to keep from choking on it. Why had she said it like that? “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said, in a rather prim voice, when I had downed the tea. “It’s quite…reassuring.”

  “Yes, it is impossible to be too careful.” She studied her gold fountain pen momentarily. “I am very intuitive. Generally I know when someone is holding something back. But it is conceivable that someone—something—could slip by me. You understand.”

  I nodded. She wore oversized iridescent earrings in the shape of hummingbirds, which swayed back and forth, clinking, when she gestured. I stared at them, mesmerized.

  “You know, most people are not really marriage material. Some people are married to their careers. Some women are so dominating, no ordinary man will want them. Some men are incredibly selfish, or mama’s boys. When I talk to people, I try to find out those things. People either conform to my guidelines, or I won’t work with them.”

  “I understand,” I said, wondering how I was going to get all this down on paper afterward. Not only that, but I was caught up in it. I wanted to be approved as match-worthy, even though I didn’t really want a match. Rejection would be devastating. It was high school all over again.

  “I’m not for everyone. I have to like you.” She put on gold wire-rimmed glasses and looked at me. “You have to like me.” The first part of the proposition sounded considerably more dubious than the second, at least in her eyes.

  I tried not to sound intimidated. “That sounds fair enough.”

  “Good. Now tell me, do you really want to get married again?”

  I almost gasped. She’d found me out already. “I—”

  She waved a hand, dismissing my protest. “I ask because you say here you rarely go out with men. Yet you are very attractive.”

  “Thank you
.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “It’s because you’re a widow,” she said positively. “You’re not desperate.”

  I’d always thought desperation acted on people, particularly male people, the way insect repellent does on wasps. It maddens them, and then it drives them away.

  She narrowed her eyes. Her voice was low and intense. “People who always say ‘I’m all right alone,’ the self-sufficient ones, they never find anyone. And do you know why?”

  “Because they’re not desperate?”

  She frowned. Levity was not to be tolerated any more than lack of desperation. “Because they find flaws in everyone. If you want to find someone, you must be receptive. You must be ready.” She looked at me inquiringly.

  I sneaked a peek at her hand. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  “I think I’m ready,” I told her. “But I don’t know for sure.”

  “But are you willing to try? Are you willing to really work at finding a life partner? If you are not, then you will be wasting both our time. You must offer me your assurances before we proceed any farther.”

  This was the hard sell, clearly. Desperate (really, by then) to defend myself, I blurted out the truth, or at least part of it. “Of course I’m committed to making this work,” I told her. “In fact, I’m interviewing at Ivanova Associates as well.”

  So far from reassuring her of the seriousness of my intentions, my revelation seemed to provoke a sort of horror, as if I’d confessed to a secret fantasy of being fixed up with Hannibal Lecter. She put down her papers and her glasses and stared at me with undisguised indignation. “What?”

  Jeff and Cynthia hadn’t advised me one way or the other about this issue, but, in retrospect, it was obviously a dumb idea to confirm that I even knew any other matchmaking service existed.

  Kathleen Wyndham was like a mountain: she made her own weather. The storm clouds were definitely moving in. I had to try to resurrect the interview.

  I looked at my hands, in what I hoped was a demure and chagrined pose. “I thought if I went to more than one service, it might increase my chances of meeting someone.”

  “Why don’t you just go to a video dating service and be done with it?” she said huffily. “I’m sure you’ll meet lots of men that way.”

  “I—”

  She leaned forward over the table. “Nobody competes with Kathleen Wyndham. I am the best. Other matchmakers don’t make weddings; they make one-night stands. They make dates.” She spit it out, as if it were a particularly odious species of snake. “They are stupid.”

  “If I’ve made a mistake, I’m—”

  “You will not like her,” she said.

  “Who?” The conversation was sliding downhill fast, and I felt sure I was shortly to be ejected from the office. If so, I wanted to grab as much information as I could on my way out.

  “The new head of that business. The old one, you know, was murdered.” She said it with undisguised satisfaction. “Ivanova was bad enough. Whatever you may have heard about her background, you may take it from me: money, money, money—that’s all she cared about. Many of her clients—former clients—have told me so.” She looked at me as if she dared me to challenge her.

  I wondered what she would say if she knew there was a good chance that her old archrival had gotten her start telling fortunes on the streets of Sofia. “I hadn’t heard that,” I told her. “In fact, I—”

  “I devote my life to making people happy,” she insisted. “No one can compete with me.”

  “That’s wonderful, really. I—”

  “She has no heart.” She was like a train, rolling right over the end of my sentences. It wasn’t a conversation; it was a juggernaut.

  “Natasha Ivanova?”

  She shook her head. The hummingbirds chattered. “The assistant. The new boss. Melanie Klein. She is like ice. You will find out.” She shrugged. “I am not jealous. I have all the clients I can handle. Go to her. But you will not like her. Very probably, you will not like anyone she introduces you to, either.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say to her. She gave me another of her penetrating looks. “I can look into a person’s eyes and know all about them. You may think you know what you want, but I know what you need. And you will not find it at Ivanova Associates. You come back to me, and I will help you find it. Then you will forget what you want.”

  The world was full of people telling you they knew what was best for you even if you didn’t want it. It didn’t sound like the perfect prescription for happiness to me, but I wasn’t about to say so.

  “I never had an assistant,” she said, with a touch of pride. “My business is me, and it works because of who I am.”

  “Yes, I can see it might be that way,” I agreed. She looked as if she’d have a serious problem with delegating authority. Sort of like Rasputin.

  “I’ve tried, but it is always a disaster, because they aren’t me,” she added, without the least trace of irony. “So, you go see this former assistant, this Melanie Klein, the cold fish who cares for only one person. And I must tell you, that person is never the client. See what she can do for you. When you have found out that what I’ve told you is true, come back here and we will talk about going further. Until then, I’ll keep your papers on file, if you like.”

  She stood up. Class dismissed, obviously.

  I tilted backward slightly to look her in the eye. “You absolutely won’t consider continuing under these circumstances?” I asked her.

  Her fit of passion seemed to have spent itself, and she looked tired. She merely shook her head.

  “Calm down,” Cynthia told me, when I called her to report the news that I had already Blown the Research. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Yes, but now she’s absolutely forbidden me to proceed as long as I have anything to do with Ivanova Associates.”

  “That’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, nice and relaxing, too, just like going on a job interview with Muammar Qaddafi and telling him your last employer was the Jewish Defense League. Christ, Cynthia, I haven’t seen such a monster ego since Mr. Joseph.”

  Mr. Joseph was our Latin teacher in high school. His favorite slogan was, “Don’t listen to them, listen to me. I know. It’s bad for you.” He used to keep us in from assemblies and pull us out of other classes to work on Latin projects. Until he got fired.

  “God,” Cynthia said appreciatively. There are some nice things about talking to people you went to high school with. There are so many reference points for the rest of your life, and you get to share them.

  “So I don’t get matched up with anyone,” I elaborated.

  She laughed. “Well, don’t sound so disappointed. I thought you were a little reluctant about that part, to say the least.”

  “Yes, but I—” But what? I’d been so involved in the whole thing that I was disappointed, and she’d caught me at it. I cleared my throat. “When I agreed to do this with you, I knew it was part of the deal,” I said, trying to sound lofty and noble. “I feel like I’ve let you down.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “Look at it this way: Maybe we can make something of it. The two most exclusive agencies in town slugging it out for the hearts and minds and wallets of the elite uncoupled. The Prima Donnas of Love. The Dueling Divas of Matrimony. That sort of thing.”

  “You are completely awesome,” I told her sincerely.

  She laughed again. “It’s just a mind-set. Instead of trying to impose a set of prearranged plans and ideas on circumstances, you let the circumstances dictate the ideas. That way, you’re open to whatever comes along.”

  “I’ll try to keep it in mind,” I said. “But what do you think I ought to do now?”

  “That’s easy. Go see Melanie Klein. Go through the preliminaries and the interview, just as you did before. After a couple of arranged meetings, you can always go back to Kathleen Wyndham. If that doesn’t work out, we might be able to get someone else t
o do it, or we’ll write it from another angle. But first get on over to Ivanova Associates.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “But Ellen…”

  “Yes?”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t say anything about Kathleen Wyndham. If you get run out of Ivanova Associates, too, we really can’t use you anymore for the research. And besides, it would blow your chance to find out anything more about the case. Remember, listen to the question, and don’t volunteer anything. Never volunteer. Those are the same instructions they give to witnesses in a trial. I found that out from a lawyer friend, and it’s good advice.”

  “I’ll try,” I told her.

  15

  At some services, the interview is in reality a bewitching process. Perfect strangers seem to find every detail of your life, past and present, unequivocally fascinating. The interviewer is your best friend, your lover, and your mother, all rolled into one. His job is to extract details of excruciating intimacy about the potential client, provoking confessions of need or dependency or loneliness. If you are tempted to talk about your cancer surgery, your alcoholic father, or the fact that you haven’t had a decent date in two years, be advised that the service can then use such confessions to break down your resistance to the sale.

  —Looking at the Love Brokers: A Guide to the Meet Market as quoted in Cynthia Weatherford’s notes

  I was halfway out the door on my way to my appointment with Melanie Klein when the phone rang. I had the machine on, so I stopped to listen, putting my purse down on the table.

  “Ellen, it’s Diana. Please pick up if you’re there.”

  Diana Tolbert was nominally my boss, the head of the consultancy firm I was associated with. Generally, I worked out of my house, but I needed to have an office and somebody to handle insurance matters and other business issues that were time-consuming and expensive for an individual consultant. I also got a lot of important referrals through the firm. I was technically an independent contractor, like a real estate agent, but Diana had the power to make my life a lot easier, not to mention more affluent.