The Matchmaker (3 page)

“I know, right?” Agnes said. “It’s so different, I feel like someone else. Yesterday morning in the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Dabney pressed her lips closed against the fifty annoying mom questions that threatened to escape:
When did you cut it? Why did you cut it? Oh, honey, why?

Agnes took a bite of chicken salad sandwich and Dabney thought,
Yes, eat, eat!
She thought this was her punishment for never going to visit her daughter in New York, despite at least two hundred invitations to do so. Her daughter had come home looking like a cross between Twiggy in the 1966
Rolling Stone
shoot and a teenage boy newly released from juvie.

Agnes swallowed and said, “CJ convinced me to do it.”

CJ, of course.

Dabney hugged her daughter. “How is CJ?” she asked.

“Great!” Agnes said. “He’s here. He came with me.”

“Did he?” Dabney sounded excited and happy, even to her own ears. “Where is he?”

“He went for a run,” Agnes said.

“Oh, good!” Dabney said. To her, the “oh, good” sounded okay. It sounded like,
Oh, good for CJ, out enjoying this glorious spring weather!
What she meant was,
Oh, good, she didn’t have to deal with CJ right this second.

Dabney took a cleansing breath and renewed her vow not to be critical of CJ. Charles Jacob Pippin was forty-four years old to Agnes’s twenty-six; he was only four years younger than Dabney. But, as Box had pointed out, Dabney had no room to complain about the age difference because Box was fourteen years older than Dabney and it had rarely, if ever, been an issue. CJ was divorced from a woman named Annabelle, who—he was eager to mention—now lived in Boca Raton, heedlessly spending the million dollars a year CJ paid her in alimony. CJ was a sports agent in New York; his client list included nine New York Giants and four prominent Yankees, as well as some top-ranked tennis players and golfers. CJ had met Agnes the preceding September at the annual benefit for the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club, where Agnes was the executive director. CJ had written a large check to the club, and then he had danced with Agnes in the Waldorf ballroom all night long. The following Monday, a box containing two dozen brand-new basketballs had arrived at the club, followed on Tuesday by a slew of new art supplies. On Wednesday, Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz called the club to see if he could come in to sign autographs for the kids; at first, Agnes had thought it was a prank call. On Thursday, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived for Agnes, along with an invitation for her to have dinner with CJ at Nougatine on Friday.

It was a wooing straight out of the movies, and Dabney couldn’t blame Agnes for succumbing. What twenty-six-year-old could resist? CJ was smart, successful, and sophisticated—he could talk about everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to the World Wrestling Federation. Since they had started dating, CJ had taken Agnes on trips to Nashville, Las Vegas, and Italy, where they drove down the Amalfi coast in a rented Ferrari.

Box, who was impressed by no one, thought CJ was the greatest thing since sliced bread. CJ golfed, he understood economic theory, he was a Republican. In Box’s mind, it was a two-for-one deal: a beau for Agnes, a friend for him.

The fight at Christmas had started when Agnes asked her mother if she and CJ were a perfect match.

Dabney’s heart had seized. She was “Cupe” for Cupid; she was Nantucket’s matchmaker, with forty-two couples to her credit, all of them still together. Dabney could tell if a couple was a perfect match just by looking at them. She saw either a rosy glow or an olive-green haze. However, Dabney didn’t like to offer her opinion on couples she didn’t fix up herself. It was pointless. People were going to make their own decisions regardless of Dabney’s predictions. Hot, passionate love—and even worse, lust—were the enemies of reason and good sense.

Dabney said, “Oh, honey, I have no idea.”

Agnes said, “Mom, please. Please tell me.”

Dabney thought about Agnes and CJ. For Christmas, CJ had given Agnes a pair of Christian Louboutin heels, a new iPad, and a gold Cartier love bracelet, which he dramatically locked onto her wrist. This final gift, especially, underscored CJ’s controlling nature. He liked Agnes to watch what she ate, and he liked her to exercise at least once a day, preferably twice. He disapproved of Agnes’s girlfriends; he thought they were “a danger to the relationship” because they met for cocktails and went to clubs in the Meatpacking District on the weekends. Now, Dabney suspected, most of the friends had fallen away. When CJ and Agnes walked together, CJ pulled her along like she was a recalcitrant child.

CJ was always charming with Dabney, but charming in a way that verged on ingratiating. He liked to reference that fact that he and Dabney were practically the same age. They had both grown up in the eighties, the era of the J. Geils Band and
Ghostbusters
; they were both in high school when the Union Carbide disaster killed half a million people in India. Dabney didn’t like that CJ had changed his name after his divorce; his first wife, Annabelle, and everyone else in his life at that time, had called him Charlie. Dabney was alarmed when CJ said he didn’t like dogs (“too dirty,”) and that he never wanted to have children. Agnes loved children; that was why she worked at the Boys & Girls Club. Now, Agnes had started saying that she didn’t care if she had children or not. Dabney wasn’t sure how to explain it reasonably, but she sensed something rotten, possibly even sinister, under CJ’s charismatic facade.

When Dabney looked at Agnes and CJ, she saw a haze that was the gray-green of clouds before a thunderstorm. Normally, when Dabney saw a miasma that bad, the couple split right away.

Dabney saw no choice but to tell Agnes the truth. A mother first, a mother forever.

“No,” she’d said. “You are not a perfect match.”

Agnes had packed her suitcase and left that very afternoon, a day and a half early, ignoring their usual day-after-Christmas tradition of prime-rib sandwiches and board games. She had left without taking any of her gifts; Dabney had been forced to pack them up and mail them to New York.

Box had been confused when he emerged from his study. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What happened? Why did they leave?” Agnes had left without saying goodbye to Box, and Dabney knew she had done so because she didn’t want Box to have the chance to try to persuade her to stay.

Dabney had sighed. “I told Agnes something she didn’t want to hear.”

Box lifted his square, black-framed glasses so that they rested in his snowy-white hair. He was a gifted and esteemed man, but there were times when Dabney wished she would be spared the lecture. Box thought her matchmaking was frivolous and silly on a good day, and abominably meddlesome in the private affairs of others the rest of the time. “What?” he asked. “What did you tell her?”

“I’d like to keep that between her and me,” Dabney said.

“Dabney.” His eyes were a piercing blue, clear and cold, exacting.

“She asked if I thought she and CJ were a perfect match.”

Box raised his chin a fraction of an inch. “Certainly you didn’t offer your opinion?”

Dabney didn’t answer. Her feet were together and her hands were clasped in front of her kilt. She was the errant student facing the headmaster. Box was her
husband,
she reminded herself. They were equals.

Box’s visage turned a florid pink. “Certainly you
did
offer your opinion. Otherwise she wouldn’t have run off.”

“Run off,” Dabney said. It was a bad habit of hers to repeat the phrases Box used that she found asinine. Like “run off." That was Professor Beech trying to sound not only Harvard-like but British. Heroines in Edwardian literature “ran off.” Agnes had climbed into her Prius and absconded without noise or toxic emissions.

“Rude of them not to say goodbye,” Box said. “I would have expected more from CJ. You just don’t stay in a man’s house, and then up and leave without a word.”

“You were working, darling,” Dabney said. “The closed door is very intimidating, as I’ve told you hundreds of times. I’m sure they didn’t want to disrupt you.”

“They wouldn’t have been
disrupting
me,” Box said. “I was only reading. And there is nothing intimidating about a closed door. All they had to do was knock.”

“It’s my fault,” Dabney said. The day after Christmas and the day after the day after Christmas were now ruined.

Box breathed audibly. He wanted to say something punishing, perhaps, but like the perfect gentleman he was, he refrained. He knew that Agnes’s departure was punishment enough.

The weather for Daffodil Weekend would be perfect, but that was it; everything else about Dabney’s life was disheveled and topsy-turvy. Her daughter had come home—that was good—but she had brought CJ with her, and that was bad.  And Clendenin Hughes would be arriving on Nantucket the next morning. Dabney did
not
feel well—her abdomen was tender, her back was sore, she was fatigued. On top of everything else, she probably had Lyme disease!

Dabney dealt with her mixed bag of circumstances the way she had dealt with everything else in her forty-eight years: she used forbearance. She began by calling Ted Field’s office and scheduling an appointment for Monday morning. Ted Field, the doctor of choice on the island, was wildly popular and always overbooked. But Dabney knew she would get an appointment because decades earlier, at her own wedding, Dabney had introduced Ted Field’s receptionist, Genevieve Lefebvre, to her husband, Brian (Couple #17). They had been married twenty-one years and had five daughters.

“What’s the matter?” Genevieve asked. “You sick?”

“Not quite right,” Dabney said. “Maybe Lyme. I don’t know. Maybe old age.”

“Oh, hush. You look the same as you did when you were seventeen,” Genevieve said. “The doc can see you at nine.”

That accomplished, Dabney felt marginally better. Maybe Lyme. Maybe just stress.

She was able to grit her teeth and make it through the rest of the day. She greeted CJ warmly, then sent him and Agnes out to pick up the blanket of daffodils and the daffodil wreath that would festoon the Impala in the Antique Car Parade the next day. She called Nina and apologized for being distracted in the office and for needlessly snapping at her.

(When Dabney had returned to the Chamber of Commerce without a strawberry frappe from the pharmacy, Nina had squinted at her in confusion. “So where did you go, then?”

And Dabney said, “You need glasses, Nina.”

Nina had recoiled as though Dabney had smacked her across the nose with a newspaper, and Dabney felt like a terrible, cranky friend.)

Now, Dabney said, “I really don’t feel well. I’m coming down with something, I think.”

“Get rest tonight, sister,” Nina said. “Tomorrow is showtime.”

Dabney put the finishing touches on the tailgate picnic for the next day, although she had prepared most of it in advance. Dabney made the same picnic every year because, just like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Daffodil Weekend was all about tradition. The ribbon sandwiches were the highlight of her picnic—crustless Pepperidge Farm white bread with a layer of egg salad (yellow), a layer of scallion cream cheese (green), and a layer of maraschino cherry cream cheese (pink). Agnes and Box teased her both for making the ribbon sandwiches and for enjoying them. It was WASP cuisine at its very essence, they said. Why not serve Velveeta on Triscuits while she was at it? Or a dish of pickled cauliflower? Dabney ignored the taunts; their aversion simply left more ribbon sandwiches for her, and for Peter Genevra, superintendent of the water company, who stopped at her picnic every year to wolf down half a dozen.

Dabney also made a bourbon-glazed spiral-cut ham, a loaf of braided honey-curry bread, poached asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a tortellini salad with herbed mayonnaise. She served lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop. She bought a bottle of Taittinger champagne for herself and Agnes, good white Bordeaux for Box, and a twelve-pack of Stella Artois to offer those who stopped to visit.

As Dabney was cutting the crusts from the Pepperidge Farm loaf, Box entered the kitchen. He had arrived that morning while she was at work; she hadn’t seen him since Monday at 7:00 a.m., when she’d dropped him at the airport as she did every Monday morning.

“Hello, dear,” he said, and he kissed her chastely on the cheek. His greeting alone summed up the way things were between them. Pleasant, civilized, sexless. He called her “darling,” or occasionally “dear.” When they were dating and first married, Dabney used to long for Thursday afternoons because back then, Box would leave Harvard when his last class was over at three, and he would often make it to the island by five. Dabney would meet his plane or his boat and they would head straight home to make love. Now, Box stayed in his faculty apartment on Thursday nights. He worked until seven or eight and then went out to dinner with colleagues. He tried to convince Dabney to come to Cambridge on Thursday evenings. There were so many new restaurants, they could attend the reading series at the Coop or go to the Symphony. But Dabney always declined. Box knew that asking Dabney to come to Cambridge was like asking her to scuba dive without an oxygen tank in Marianas Trench. She believed, in her own mind, that she simply would not survive.

Box grew weary at her refusal to travel, and Dabney grew aggravated at him for trying to prod her into it.
I never pretended to be anyone else!
she had shouted at him a few years back. The shouting had been startling to them both—theirs was not a marriage where emotions ran hot—and the discussion died there. Box stayed in Cambridge on Thursday nights, and Dabney stayed on Nantucket.

Now, as usual, Dabney said, “How was your week?”

“Good,” Box said. “My Turkish editor called. They’re picking up the new edition.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Dabney said. In addition to holding an endowed chair, Box had authored the macroeconomics textbook used by more than four hundred universities across the country. It had been translated into twenty-four languages. Box wrote an updated edition every three years; the amount of income this generated was nauseating. Box made somewhere between three and four million dollars a year off the textbook; his salary from Harvard was a mere three hundred thousand. The money meant little to Box and even less to Dabney, other than that they never had to worry about it. Their house on Charter Street was historically preserved in its every element, and they had slowly and carefully filled it with antiques and art. It would pass to Agnes. Dabney was the proud owner of a 1966 tomato-red Chevy Impala with a white vinyl top, which was something of a money pit, but she treasured it. Box drove a battered Jeep Wrangler on Nantucket and an Audi RS 4 on the mainland. They never took vacations, because of Dabney, although Box went to London for two weeks every June to teach at the School of Economics, and he attended a conference in November that switched locations—San Diego, Amsterdam, Honolulu. They anonymously donated a hundred thousand dollars each year to the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club, where Agnes worked, and a hundred thousand to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. And that was the extent of their spending.