THE MATCHMAKER
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2004
“Uccchh. I hate this day,” Victoria D’Amico thought the next morning as she pulled her car into the parking lot of the Roslyn Medical Arts Building. And the reason for this departure from her usual good cheer was in the passenger seat, right next to her.
Morris’s Mets tickets. Unused from the night before.
She stared at the dull yellow brick walls of her office building. The morning was gray. The first drops of a light rain pinged at her windshield. The radio blared Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”—one of Victoria’s favorites and, she was known to say, her “theme song.” She would raise her palms outward, gyrate her shoulders, contort her face, and sing. Now, all she could do was echo the words half-heartedly.
Some uptown girl she was. Even with two tickets to a luxury skybox at Shea Stadium to see the Mets play the Astros, she had spent the night alone, without a date, without a friend, cross-legged on her couch, wrapped in a pink terry-cloth robe, dipping into a bag of microwave popcorn and watching the one movie that she always reserved for such nights: Sleepless in Seattle.
Tom Hanks and Jerry D’Amico. Contrast and compare.
Hanks: suave, sensitive, inquisitive.
Jerry: “I don’t watch chick flicks.”
No one was able to go with her to the game. No boyfriends to speak of (“I’m not ready for the dating scene so soon after Jerry ruined my life.”). Not Dr. Kirleski (“I’m sorry, Victoria. Mrs. Kirleski is dragging me to one of her charity medical dinners.”). Even Morris Feldstein turned her down. I mean, Morris Feldstein! What could he have going on? Nice guy, but I mean, c’mon. You stick two Mets tickets in my face, I practically beg you to take me, and you say no? What is that?
Which is why she spent the night with Tom Hanks.
The lobby to Dr. Kirleski’s office was empty and dark. A single window, facing the street, provided as much light as a porthole in a prison cell. Magazines were strewn on coffee tables; their six-month-old pages tattered by the germ-infested fingers of patients. Mismatched couches and fabric chairs were propped against the walls. And those walls! Those walls had always annoyed Victoria. It was Dr. Kirleski’s idea to plaster them with meditative landscapes, which he thought would lull his patients into a relaxed state, as if staring at a Sonoran Desert sunrise would make it more pleasant to have a stick scraped against the enflamed recesses of a strep throat. The scenic montage was interrupted with dire skull-and-crossbones warnings from the Centers for Disease Control. There, above a couch, was a photograph of turquoise waves lapping against an untouched Caribbean beach, then the dazzling greenery of an Amazon rain forest, then a startling display of skin-rash patterns associated with Lyme disease.
A small television was mounted on a corner shelf. She turned it on with a remote to see footage of President Bush and some geeky-looking guy who was about the become head of the CIA. She turned it off.
Every time you turn on the TV they scare you half to death, she thought. With the color-coded warnings and Iraq and Afghanistan and car bombs. Who needs it?
She plunked her purse on the desk behind the glass partition. Prepared to sit, she heard rattling sounds coming from Dr. Kirleski’s rear office—the familiar opening and closing of drawers and the shuffling of papers. There he goes, she thought, looking for something that’s probably right in front of him. A brilliant diagnostician, they said of him. Just not able to identify his own nose. She marched through a darkened corridor, past Exam Rooms 1, 2, and 3, past the heavy metal cabinets where years of chicken-scratch records were filed and medical samples were stored. She entered Dr. Kirleski’s tiny office. He sat behind his desk with a perplexed expression, scratching the few white wisps of hair left on his scalp.
“Oh, Victoria. Good. Have you seen the file on Mrs. Johanson?”
She approached the desk and picked the file from under the morning New York Times. “Aaaaahhh,” he said, as if he were opening wide for his own throat exam. “Thank you, Victoria. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Sure, Doctor K.”
He cleared his throat, a signal of more to come.
“So . . . how was the Mets game?”
Ucccchhh. He had to ask. Bad enough I didn’t go, but now my pathetic little life has to be his business. “I stayed home. Wasn’t in the mood.”
“Stayed home? By yourself?”
No, stayed home with the Mets. They all came over after the game. “Yes. By myself.”
Dr. Kirleski stared at her, as if diagnosing some horrible disease. Terminal loneliness, she assumed.
“Well, Doris had an idea. We met someone last night. At the charity dinner. She thought you might like to meet him. I have his card. Here, somewhere.”
Oh God, Victoria thought as Dr. Kirleski raked his fingers through the jumble of papers on his desk. Another find by Doris Kirleski. There was Romance.com, Cupid.com, Match.com. And there was Doris Kirleski. As if the divorce from Jerry made Victoria some kind of charity case. To be pandered to and pitied, to be made Doris’s pet project. With that condescending voice, assuring Victoria, “Don’t worry. I’ll find someone for you. You’re special.” Pronouncing special as if she really meant “pathetic.”
And the matches this matchmaker made!
The multiple divorcées; the massive bellies; the balding scalps and comb-overs; the open shirts blossoming thick tangles of chest hair; the heavy cologne and clunky jewelry; the “father types” who were on the fast track to an assisted living facility; the “such-a-nice-guys” with the clammy handshakes and mumbled conversations; the players who never missed an opportunity to peer down her blouse; the loners, the losers, the louses. Either they were barely a step ahead of Jerry or barely a step behind. Ucccchhh.
“Here it is!” He squinted at the business card in front of him. “Doris thinks this one is perfect.”
Doris thought the “small businessman” who picked me up in a taxi was perfect. His small business was driving the taxi.
“You’re making that face!” Dr. Kirleski warned.
“What face?”
“The face when you scrunch up your nose and curl down your lips. Like you’re swallowing bad medicine.”
“It’s just that—”
“Victoria. I met this guy myself. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Call him. One date. What do you have to lose?”
She unscrunched. “I’ll think about it, Doctor K. Your first appointment is almost here.”
By the time she returned to her desk, she’d thought it over. She looked past the glass partition and out the waiting room porthole, toward her car, where the two unused Mets tickets sat, souvenirs of her loneliness. And she thought of another night, watching Sleepless in Seattle again, in that ratty “feel-sorry-for-myself” robe, with her fingertips saturated in popcorn oil.
She picked up the card and read it:
RICARDO MONTOYEZ
Chairman of the Board
VON ESCHENBACH’S SYNDROME FOUNDATION.
Victoria D’Amico prided herself on her cynicism toward men. It was born and bred out of her marriage to that-bastard-Jerry-who-screwed-the-slut-behind-the-counter-and-kicked-me-to-the-curb. Still, she thought, cynicism may have been the armor that protected her from being hurt again, but it made a lousy companion.
At some point Doris Kirleski’s inventory of damaged goods has to be exhausted. Somewhere, there has to be someone for me. My one true love.
She cradled the business card in her palm.