Fall 2000 Charles River Review: The Right Link

So I don't want you to think I'm a loser, but I was out of what my former wife called "our very bad relationship" for two years, and not meeting anybody, women that is, when my buddy, Eddie, suggested I try the Web. Or, as he put it, "You'll have a better chance online, Phil, because they won't see you until after you've begun a relationship."

I still wince at the word "relationship." I convinced my Ex, and it may be the only argument I ever won, to characterize our unfortunate existential situation as "our very bad marriage" instead of "our very bad relationship." We were, in fact, married four years. So I took Eddie's advice and signed up with "The Right Link" online dating service.

It costs $55 to join. You write a blurb of 25 words describing yourself and then a one-page bio where you answer several irrelevant questions like "How would your best friends describe you physically?" and "Describe your perfect Sunday." For the blurb you use codes like SWM and DWFP. I guess that leaves you with more of your 25 words to write something interesting or informative. It's an opportunity everyone squanders. I certainly did, except for the potato recipes:

DWM, 32, successful, attractive professional. 5'10", athletic build. Enjoys hiking, skiing, travel. Likes to share cooking, dancing, film, potato recipes. Seeks SWF/22-32, warmth, and love.

For the bio though, Eddie convinced me to put some effort into it. "Listen to me. The femmes will see your blurb and see you're in their target demo and order your bio. That's where you got to have the right stuff."

"Don't I just repeat the successful-attractive story from the blurb?" I asked naively.

"No. Everyone says they're successful and attractive. Our femmes are thinking, 'If you're so successful, why're you trolling online?' and 'Maybe you are attractive, but on what planet?' They know, as a practical matter, they're gonna have to sift through 20 of these things to get one or two nondroolers."

"I need to stand out somehow."

"Exactly, mein droog. You are not a person here, but a product, and you need product differentiation."

So for the bio I combined Eddie's idea of product differentiation with my theory that women don't care so much what you look like as long as you're above some minimally acceptable threshold. Eddie wasn't convinced.

"Femmes want the cute guys. Guys want the cute femmes. I don't get your theory."

"A lot of guys think they want some ideal woman they dream up. But what they fail to realize is that this ideal woman, if they ever found her, wouldn't want them. So what's the point?"

"And you think our femmes don't want some Hollywood dream machine?"

"Women are different. Yeah, they think Ben Affleck, but they know Ben's busy, so they set a "looks" threshold. When a guy is over the threshold, they investigate to see if he can talk, or at least mutter something decipherable."

"Okay, but I hope you didn't put all this theory crap in your bio." Eddie was worried.

"No, I merely wrote that 'my best friend' described me as 'having facial features more symmetric than Picasso's The Guitar Player, a frame sleeker than the Pillsbury Doughboy, and a demeanor more savory than Quasimodo,'" I said. "That's your classic differentiation with a very low threshold."

"I don't like the Quasimodo thing without saying you don't drool."

But I had already e-mailed the bio in. As it turned out, we didn't need to worry. Our theories were right. I got three-dozen e-mails the first week after my bio was posted. From zero women to more than 30 in one week. God, I love technology. After mass-dating for two weeks, I found Amy Thompson, who in her contact e-mail said she was "a lawyer but otherwise lacking in serious character flaws." We talked and laughed for three hours when I called, following-up her e-mail.

The thing I especially liked about Amy, other than she seemed nice and smart and cute, if you believed ten percent of her picture, was her song segues. When she talked to me at first, she had a pleasant Midwestern girl-type voice, but after we had spent a little time on the phone, she would sometimes take some phrase and start singing it. My dad used to do that, too, but I always thought he was just making the songs up because I didn't recognize them. Amy would sing recognizable tunes but change the words.

"So why'd you e-mail me?" I asked.

"The potato recipe and Quasimodo. You obviously didn't take yourself or this dating thing too seriously," she answered.

Eddie was afraid Quasimodo was over the top. But I figured anyone who knew about The Hunchback of Notre Dame would be hooked. "Were you amused?"

"Amused? Me? No, I just thought, 'Don't cry for me, Quasimodo.'" She began to sing something like Madonna's version of "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." She continued, "I wish I was your cathedral." I knew then that she was one in a million.

I sat at the bar of the Delhi Star, waiting for Amy and her parents, on our first date, the result of some inscrutable and regrettable karma. My parents were already inside the restaurant seated at a table overlooking Harvard Square. Travel, a bad case of the flu, and always-intrusive jobs had kept Amy and me apart for four weeks. Then her parents were flying in from Cleveland for the weekend and unless we did something desperate, we wouldn't see each other for still another week or two. I proposed a desperate solution. I didn't want to see her with her parents on the first date by myself, but I saw the possibilities if I brought my parents, too.

"The important thing," I said in our last phone conversation before the date, "is we get to look across the table and see how the other person will look in 30 years. I don't like that there are no warranties in this dating business."

"We could always have a five-year term-renewable marriage," Amy suggested. "The contract could cover sudden unexplained 60-day absences or our chemistry fading."

"Don't talk about chemistry." I knew she was joking, but chemistry is a word I hate, maybe worse than relationship. "How long have we spent on the phone?"

"At least 20 hours."

"And how much e-mail?"

"Dozens, reams."

"And we know we like each other already." I sounded agitated. "If we don't have chemistry sometime in the future, we'll have thermodynamics or nuclear fusion. Chemistry is not really an organized body of knowledge anyway."

My over-sensitivity to "chemistry" was due to more than the fact that I got a D in the subject as a freshman in college, my lowest grade ever. More, I didn't get two jobs, jobs I wanted, and in one case needed, because according to the headhunters the "chemistry" wasn't right. And my Ex always said that our relationship got so bad because we lost our chemistry.

"You're right," Amy said. "And no science will help us with two sets of parents on a first date. We'll be outnumbered and outweighed."

"By 250 pounds at least. I hope your parents are nonviolent," my mood lifted.

"Not so violent they leave any forensic evidence," she said, making me laugh.

The Delhi Star was a rising restaurant off Harvard Square, literally. Every five years it rose one story. It started in the basement in the '80s when the Harvard crowd discovered there was more to ethnic cuisine than pizza. It got to the first floor in the early '90s. Its final ascension to the second floor in '98 avoided the cost of a revitalized Cambridge lease and expanded the lounge with a dance floor.

As I sat there in the bar, I fretted. Was Amy out of my league? In junior high school you didn't have to take chances. You would hear disembodied whispers in the halls and cafeteria, "Janie likes you." Or "Sarah thinks you're cute." By high school or college you would just ask out your friends. There was no stress as long as you stayed in your league and avoided Miss Americas who could slam your ego around like a world wrestling mismatch. After school, say at a bar or party, a not-quite-hidden smirk could send you down to the minors in seconds, especially if you had just used one of your best lines, like "Hello" or "Did I leave my Nobel Peace Prize over here somewhere?" Now with web dating you don't know if someone is out of your league until you meet her. Sometimes you'd gladly suffer a small humiliation to escape, but you're stuck for an hour or two at least.

A woman walked through the door. Thirtyish with dark hair. No parents. Five minutes later in walked a woman with dark hair, a dark red dress, and two older people in tow. She walked directly over to me, obviously recognizing me, and took my hand. In the same motion, she hugged me and pecked me on the cheek. I had forgotten how soft a woman's embrace could be, how warm her lips, how beguiling her smile when it's for you. She had curly hair, not too long, and dark full eyebrows that framed large glowing brown eyes with no makeup. A small chin balanced her nose and I would have called her cute, except she smiled at me. Then she was beautiful. All thoughts of leagues, major and minor, vanished. How could we make the evening work?

After I met her dad, whom everybody called Red because he once had red hair, and Ellen, her mom, we walked back to the table where my parents sat. I didn't looked too closely at the Thompsons except to note that Amy's parents were about the same mid-sixtyish age as mine and belonged to the same consumption community, sport coat and oxford shirt from Brooks Brothers for her dad and a simple monochrome dress for her mother, but blue instead of black, and a gold necklace and earrings instead of pearls like my mom. My father stood as they approached, and they all introduced themselves before Amy or I could do it more formally. The champagne my father had ordered sat chilled. It was soon distributed, and then poured, as we all began to chat.

"I hear you're in banking, Phil," said Amy's father.

"Finance, yes, I formulate various financial products, test them in econometric models and sometimes small markets, then tweak them to make sure they have the return we need, then hand them over to marketing." I tried to sound my professional best.

"Phil created the first index fund for municipal bonds," chimed in my dad.

"Amy did some work for some banks last year," said Ellen, Amy's mother. "She was summa cum laude at Yale and went to Harvard Law School. And clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brennan." Wow, I thought, Amy never told me about the awards or clerkship.

"Amy, do you spend much time in court?" asked my mom.

"Not any more. I don't litigate. Ours is mostly a corporate practice."

"She hasn't prosecuted since she left the Suffolk County DA's office," Ellen said. "She left right after she got her first husband elected District Attorney."

At that point my mom and dad looked at me as though perhaps I should have prepped them better on our drive into Cambridge. Then my dad smiled. He had worked for 40 years at AT&T before retiring to travel, church fairs, gardening, and my mother's ceramic projects. Now, to entertain himself, he always looked for small potential disasters so that he could contribute to them. There was a gleam in his eye.

Looking directly at me, Amy said in a sincere voice, "I was going to tell you when we got together by ourselves. It didn't seem like a phone or e-mail topic."

"She was so young, she didn't know what she was doing. And the second one won't really count after it's annulled." Ellen was determined to give us more information than we really needed.

"What would you say the optimum number of husbands is, Ellen?" asked my dad. He would have sounded almost philosophical to me if I didn't know about his penchant for disasters. But before anyone else could decide whether or not they should be embarrassed, Ellen answered.

"Four," she said, "Priscilla Harrington had six husbands, and told me she should have stopped at four, and would have, too, if not for the war."

"Which war?" my dad nudged the disaster along.

"Vietnam, of course; you didn't dump your husband in World War II; it just wasn't done. Priscilla didn't marry her third husband until after Japan surrendered. She was as patriotic as the next person. Then number two, missing for years, shows up after the war. You can imagine her embarrassment," Ellen said.

"Wars are embarrassing to a lot of people." My dad was about to nudge again. Before he did, Red spoke.

"That's for sure: Korea embarrassed the hell out of me," he said. It was then I knew the evening would get a second chance. My dad was a Korean veteran, too. Luckily Red had been in the Air Force and not the Marines like my dad, otherwise they might have arranged a marriage right then. Red wanted to be a jet pilot when he enlisted but ended up loading bombs on jets. The Marines made my dad a communications officer. He typed and radioed a lot but didn't fire a gun until the Chinese came pouring over the Yalu. Then everyone was in the front line. But that's all we learned of the war because they would only talk about their mischief on leave in Tokyo. They didn't like to speak in mixed company of their work or their wars, and I knew my father would change the subject.

"Here's to more husbands and fewer wars," he toasted.

"Only one more husband and no more wars," said Red. There was a murmur of approval as the champagne bubbled down. The waiter came by to discuss the menu. We placed our orders with the understanding that any great discovery would be shared. Amy and I thought an Indian restaurant would allow our parents to talk about food for an hour or two, if nothing else. We hadn't anticipated everyone would be getting quite this intimate, quite this soon. And, for some reason my mom wanted to get back to what I considered dangerous ground, instead of extending the discussion about tandoori baking.

"Well, I'm sure you know Phil was married, too," she said. I couldn't tell if she was just trying to provide full disclosure or establish some kind of untenable moral high ground. I hadn't told Amy much about the disaster except to say that my wife left because of chemical issues, sort of implying she was on drugs.

"You know, here we are, both on our first marriages, yes?" Red gestured to the older people. "It seems that the younger generation needs some trial runs."

"They don't have strong enough friendship in the marriage," my mother offered.

"Or they don't have very realistic expectations for their relationships," Ellen chimed in. Relationship! I took a sip of champagne. How profound! I took another sip of champagne. My father's contribution was next. I took another sip.

"Well, young people basically don't understand the difference between a relationship and a marriage." He paused dramatically, like Moses between the commandment on murder and the one on adultery. "Relationships are where women test their notions about the perfectibility of men. Marriages, on the other hand, are where women discover to their horror, forget perfectible, men are not even improvable."

Red laughed, Amy sort of chortled, Ellen and I just nodded, but for different reasons I'm sure. My mom, though, began to dispute this lovely theory. I guess she was thinking of me, not my dad, and didn't want anyone to think I couldn't be improved. The only trouble was that she knew more of where I needed improvement than anyone else. Once again it was dangerous territory. I took another sip of champagne.

"That's not true, John. Phil has gotten much better and will never be in prison again." Somehow I knew, call it instinct, an instinct finely honed by a few sips of champagne, that I would be called upon to explain my mother's unfortunate reference to incarceration. However, as clear as the explanation was in my mind, I was unable to articulate it quite as quickly and cogently as I wanted to at the time.

Now it was Ellen and Red who looked at Amy, who looked at me. I tried to smile, a smile exuding the confidence of the innocent while sipping simultaneously at my champagne. My coordination, as luck would have it, was not at its peak, and the champagne dribbled, just a little, down my chin and shirt into my lap. My luck began to change, though, as the waiter brought the food. I wondered if everyone was still going to share. The naan and flat breads looked good. The tandoori dishes filled the air with roasted aromas. The bukhara daal and palak paneer made you wonder why we don't add some kind of spice to all vegetables. I was considering some Kingfisher beer but ordered tea, instead, in the hope that my coordination and lucidity would rebound as I explained what had been a complicated and easily misunderstood arrest.

First of all, no one is sure the car was totaled. Even if it was, it probably will never be found in that part of the Atlantic without a pretty expensive search that wouldn't prove much. After all, no one was killed. Second, if the car wasn't damaged, I really didn't do anything wrong, and third, the officer would have been a lot cooler, and probably not have made any arrests, if it had not been his car. His daughter being with Eddie and me didn't actually help us that much either. You see my problem. It's not something you talk about on a first date with parents. It's really a little too complicated to explain to such a large group.

Now, unfortunately, although my family, well versed in the history and circumstances of the arrest, seemed placid enough, I sensed that the Thompsons, as a group and I would say individually as well, were agitated. It did not help that my initial explanation was less than compelling. But recalling the chronology of events more accurately during my continued elaboration, I felt I had recovered by the end of the tandoori. Red and Amy seemed much calmer. Ellen, on the other hand, probably because she hadn't followed the intricacy of my narrative closely, was still uneasy.

"That poor girl," she said, "How could you involve a minor in what could have turned out to be a major felony?" I was about to respond in the same reasoned tones as before, but my mom sort of jumped in.

"It's not Phil's fault. If it weren't for Eddie, he wouldn't even have been there. And the girl was two years older than both of them."

"But she didn't know what was happening," Ellen continued.

"No one knew. That's the point. You can't expect 15 year-olds to understand complicated mechanical things," my mom said loudly.

"An emergency brake is not that complicated," Ellen said, even more loudly.

"On a Datsun 310, you don't know that." My mom didn't know so she was certain Ellen didn't either. "One pump on the thing or two, or did it lose its handle? It's not an easy thing like an annulment." My mom, unfortunately, was swinging over to the offensive, to the horror of Red and my dad, and Amy and me. The tables near us were already beginning to stare at us.

"The annulment is because the jerk misrepresented his sexual orientation," Ellen said at a volume that reached beyond our immediate neighborhood.

"There are ways to find out about sexual orientation before you get married," my mom contributed very helpfully to this discussion.

"Not everyone is immoral in youth," said Ellen with some conviction.

"Not everyone is stupid, either," my mother offered.

"Well, there are diseases out there, you know." Ellen was also speaking loudly again.

"Yeah, mental as well as physical diseases are all over the place." My mom was, I am certain, merely submitting statistical data. But, since she said it so loudly, I was afraid she might alarm others in the restaurant who usually choose their eating establishments under the assumption that they are largely disease-free.

At this point, Amy's whisper interrupted. "Mom, I have to go to the ladies room. Come with?" They soon glided together towards the front. My dad, who normally enjoys these little discussions when they are more or less under control, began to talk to Red who also seemed a little shell-shocked.

"Red, when did you get out of the Air Force?"

"1954, then went to school on the GI Bill."

"'54, a year that will live in infamy," my dad said. "The Tribe lost four straight to the Giants in the series." His voice was distant and sad.

"And after winning 111 games that year, a league record," added Red, already in empathy. "My friends and I had many late night discussions . . . how could there be a God who let something like that happen."

"Garcia and Lemon and Wynn, all 20-game winners. How could it happen?" my dad continued to drift sadly.

"And Narleski and Mossi in the bullpen," Red mused dejectedly.

Joined together like skilled coroners, Red and my dad dissected the cadaver of the Cleveland Indians' loss to the New York Giants in the 1954 World Series. Hearing about baseball in depth, especially eras before I was born, always numbs my brain. But, more important, it was having the same narcotic effect on my mom. Sipping a little champagne, sampling the daal, and smiling politely at the Tribe-talk, she seemed to be mellowing. Then as Amy and Ellen returned, a band set up near the dance floor began playing some ballads from the '50s. I asked Amy to dance.

"I thought you said there would be no violence," I reminded her.

"Yes, and body parts are certainly classified as forensic evidence," she said.

"How's your mom?" I asked.

"She's fine. She just got carried away. I reminded her that it was inappropriate for parents to yell at each other on first dates." Amy seemed more upbeat.

"How about you?"

"I'm surviving. I'm really sorry that I didn't tell you about the husband thing. If it was only one, I would have mentioned it but, with two down and out, I think it needs some explanation. And there's no annulment. I don't know why my mother keeps saying that. It's just a second divorce."

The '50s number was over and the band began to play a show tune the Beatles did, "Bells in the Hills." Red came out with my mom and my dad came out with Ellen to dance. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. And then I got this flash of insight, and I asked Amy whimsically, "Do you realize that chemistry and therapy both have the same number of syllables and end in y?" I wanted to retract it the second I said it, because up until then I had been doing pretty well. But Amy just laughed a little.

"I'm sure that it's more than a coincidence," she smiled. "And who do we invite on our next date, our complete extended family, therapists, chemists, former spouses, or..."

"Maybe the Blue Man Group," I suggested. "They could really clarify a lot of our issues." But I was thinking as she was smiling again, she said "next date" and if she's there, so am I. She has a really pretty smile, let me tell you. And she could read when she was four. And she clerked at the Supreme Court. And she's only been married twice. And she dances well. And her folks are great. And did I mention she has a pretty smile?