Marry or Burn Read online

  “Look, she misspelled entrepreneur,” said my husband Sam.

  “It’s a typo,” Meg said.

  “You can always run Spell Check,” said Sam, who knows little or nothing about computers.

  The third: no photograph.

  Andrei (pronounced Andre) can take you to the stars! Andrei is a filmmaker who is going places. He has filmed all over the States, he’s got the scoop on this nation and is ready for the big screen. About to pull up stakes here and take his visions south to Filmland, Andrei will miss the trails and mountain hideaways of our state, and the shared solitude of exploring the rainforest. Ready to focus his lens on lovely You, Meg.

  Of course we were uneasy. That recurring stuff about “this nation.” Admittedly this was just after the planes hit the towers and stirred feelings of unity among unlikely allies. Patriotism was coming around again, Sam said. Looking back, he said, he remembered detecting a hint of it some time before, in the phrase the power of place. That was the title of a course at the community college that our daughter had taken over for her friend Stacey when Stacey had her baby.

  But who was this Lali? We knew she was from India; what did she know of American dating customs?

  “Her site isn’t for dating,” Meg said humbly. “It’s for marriage.”

  And too we had to wonder what Meg had typed in about herself to produce this particular list of three. She is lovely. With her thick brown hair and big eyes she’s a very pretty girl, but shy. In college she did well and had boyfriends, one of them serious, but in the next ten or twelve years the men dried up. Now she was at that stage between all the good ones being taken and the return of those same men, divorced, like salmon coming back up the river.

  But what, Sam wanted to know, was the algorithm? Had Meg specified Stable Provider, Easygoing Ways, and the Outdoors? Or had she merely revealed her gentle, practical, perversely kind nature to Lali of DataMate?

  Meg took them in order, one, two, three. The farmer was Lali’s first choice for Meg.

  From the dinner with him, Meg came back with muddy shoes and a sad mouth. She had not met him in a restaurant, she had driven out to his farm. When she found it, a big piece of land near the airport with an ACREAGE FOR SALE, ZONED COMMERCIAL sign on it, she parked on the shoulder, crossed a field on foot, and knocked on the door.

  Here I tried to keep my breathing even. What was she thinking, driving out there alone to see a man she had never met? “Were you . . . apprehensive?” I said. At thirty-four she was too old to be screamed at.

  No, it was in the daytime. Lali had visited beforehand. Lali e-mailed, telephoned, met in person, and visited the home of every person on her list. She was bonded. The agency was her own; she had founded it, and kept it a small enterprise. She was careful, dedicated, and, because she was a Bengali, attuned on a personal level to the subtleties of matchmaking. Meg had complete trust in her.

  Lali had made an exception to the rule that the first meeting between her clients must be in a public place, because this man Marcus (not Mark) could not be lured from his house. She herself, Lali, had gone there to meet him. Never, I said to Meg silently, Never, Never Go Unaccompanied to the House of a Man You Don’t Know and Get Out of the Car and Go In.

  He opened the door as if he had been standing with his hand on the knob. After a careful look at him and a handshake, Meg stepped into his house.

  What did he look like? Oh, it wasn’t his looks—he was better looking, she realized, than she had expected, tall and fair-haired. It was his loneliness. His standing there in the half-light cast not by candles but by a computer left on in the dining room. He was lonely. Lonely and dejected beyond her powers of description. Oh, she would, our daughter, have given anything to be able to help that man. Except that the only thing givable at that point was herself. At first he was unable to enter into conversation. Now and then he would dive deep and come up with a sentence in his teeth, while Meg talked easily and at length, as she would not ordinarily do, being shy despite her years of teaching.

  True, they sat so long on the porch, she on a rusty glider and he on the step so she couldn’t see his face, that they witnessed the sunset. They saw a horse plod along the fencerow throwing its head up and back as if to take a pill, and another one follow it with slow, fated steps. She asked if they were his horses. “Some are, for now,” he said. “The two fellas at the fence, the bay over there with the herd.” There were cattle in the field as well. “Some of the horses you see are boarders.” She felt, as it got darker and he seemed to have dived for good, that she was in the presence of an almost-departed spirit making one last effort to stay in a human body.

  His 4x4 was a pickup with a rifle rack in the back window. “At least,” said Meg, who is a pacifist vegetarian, “the rack was empty.”

  “How did you know the rifle wasn’t behind the door?” her father said, wringing his hands. “How do you know people weren’t buried in the back yard? Who is this Lali that you would put this kind of trust in her?”

  With the sunset over, Meg rose and took the man’s cold hand in hers for the second time. Every mound had a callus, because he really was a farmer, had been growing alfalfa and pumpkins and keeping horses for ten years, and boarding horses and ponies owned by people in the city. Meg loved horses, though she knew them only from books. She loved cows as well, probably, she explained, because the brown-eyed white face of a stuffed animal from her childhood was stuck in her memory. A soft, floppy cow. Or possibly because the country had seen a mass production of china cows in her youth. They were everywhere; they were salt shakers, pitchers, key rings. People felt a love for the cow, Meg said, love for something a cow stood for or memorialized. This was the result—not the cause, which was commercial—of the herds of china cows. Meg could speak as an anthropologist while having a china cow on her desk.

  Marcus had lost a wife, two years before. The wife had not died, she had left. She had turned her back on fields, horses, husband. One of her jobs had been to run one of those pumpkin patches with bales of hay, scarecrows, hot cider in an open kettle, and prizes for the kids who came out on school trips at Halloween. That’s what the painted wagons were for, two of them beside the shed. Pulled by a garden tractor, the kids rode out into the rows of vines and came back with pumpkins on their laps. Marcus and his wife had had no children of their own.

  Bit by bit Meg got all this out of him. The computer on the table had belonged to his wife, who had left so fast she didn’t even take it, and one day he had been just fiddling with it and somehow run across Lali’s service, DataMate. He didn’t realize, as Meg did, that the site must have been something his wife had bookmarked. Later Meg had Lali look for his wife around the matchmaking sites, but Lali didn’t find her.

  “Goodbye, Marcus,” Meg said. Goodbye. She felt she had known this man for many years, getting only as far in that time as she had in this one evening. It was all she could do not to offer him the friendship of e-mail, or a phone check-in. But something in his sealed lips kept her still.

  The candles he had made were mud-colored things hardened in orange juice cans, from the melted stumps of other candles. There were so many on the windowsills and arrayed on the tablecloth and on the top of the refrigerator that she saw the candle-making was not a hobby but a tether to action, active life, life.

  He had a lot of money available to him, and a college degree. How did she know? He told her. She had a sense of the complete truth of everything he claimed. He had been selling off prime land, but there was enough of it left, good grazing land, to lease to his neighbor while he was making up his mind what he was going to do. The sun had gone down but there was still light. Following her into the field of deep, wet grass to her car, he pointed out the driveway she could have taken, a few yards from where she had parked. She rolled her window down and said, “It was a lovely sunset.”

  “Dawn’s where you see the real color.” He punched a thumb at the mountains across the road, and then he faded back into the semidark as
she backed and turned and waved. Finally he too waved and walked off in the direction of the fence where they had seen the horses.

  THE SECOND ONE She met on the sidewalk in front of a café on The Ave, the main drag in the University District. This time Lali was there to make the introduction, and when she was gone they went in and sat drinking coffee for half the day.

  What did he look like?

  Why did we keep asking this question? Because as her parents it was the first thing we could think of to ask. He too was tall. Tall and thin. Something in the way she said this made Sam ask how tall. Six feet, six inches.

  “That’s tall,” Sam said. After a minute he said, “Does he have long arms?” He did. “Long legs?” He did. “Long fingers? Really long?” Sam said, holding his palm out an inch from his own fingertips. Long. “Well,” Sam said, “I doubt you looked into his mouth to see if he has a high-arched palate.”

  “What are you getting at, honey?” I said. Sam is a doctor who likes to make deductions from physical description. When his sister and her husband visited, Sam made a bet that the lump they kept talking about in their German shepherd’s neck was not cancer but a benign nerve-sheath tumor, and after the biopsy they called up delighted, as if he had been the one to spare the dog.

  “Marfan’s syndrome,” Sam said.

  Our daughter had no interest in Marfan’s syndrome. To our dismay, however, she did seem interested in this young man, who, it turned out, had been living in a University District rooming house while job-hunting, but had been evicted, and had not yet found a place to live, even though he now had money in hand that his parents had wired. His name was Kevin and he was several years younger than Meg. For two nights he had slept in the open, getting to know the residents of Ravenna Park, who had befriended and sheltered him like the fairies who built the house around the girl, whose name was not Wendy, in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, a different book from Peter Pan. So he told Meg, showing her a copy in the university library where he liked to stash his backpack and stretch his legs out and read during the day. He showed her the thick novel he had written. “Did you read it?” Sam said, because both of us could picture Meg taking it home and reading every word as she would her students’ papers. No. It was his only copy.

  No address. No job. I wouldn’t have put much thought into the words tall or short until Meg was looking for a husband. Kevin was too tall for comfort. Forced to travel along up above everybody else, too tall to be unnoticed, so tall his height might seem to account for everything he did or didn’t do. None of this could be uttered, and I was ashamed of the forebodings her father and I were sharing behind our smiles.

  It was all so old-fashioned, so tinged with the foreign; it had the flavor of the sluggish, mysterious comings and goings in an opium den, this search for a husband for Meg.

  “I’d like to meet this Lali,” Sam said. That would be a small step we might allow ourselves with Meg, some distance from announcing a wish to meet any of the three prospective husbands.

  “Don’t keep saying this Lali, please,” Meg said reasonably. The awful prose of Lali’s descriptions had made no impression on Meg, whose degree was in anthropology and comparative religion but who was teaching composition at the community college and should have noticed Lali’s style. In less than a year Lali had become her close friend.

  “If she’s a friend how come she had to write up these . . . compositions?” I said. “Why couldn’t she just sit down with you and describe these guys honestly?”

  “It was a formal arrangement,” said Meg with dignity. “And the descriptions were in her database.”

  “I think she knows our Meg is a bit too kindhearted for her own good,” Sam said.

  “A pushover, you mean,” Meg said.

  “Not what I mean.”

  “These descriptions are honest,” Meg said. “If you read them carefully, it’s all there.” She grinned. It was after she met the third one, the borderline, that we were having this discussion, speaking openly about Meg’s decision to try to meet someone serious, someone to consider marrying.

  BORDERLINE IS A PSYCHIATRIC diagnosis, not at all the ironic all-purpose label it is in lay talk. She’s really borderline, we say, meaning somebody is capable of going, and might go, too far. But in the field of psychology it means something specific. It means a person damaged in childhood, usually, who has formed a personality consisting of impulsivity, paranoia, and avidity for affection.

  “You mean in this entire city all this Lali could find for Meg was three creeps? For Meg?” Sam’s blood pressure was up because the third one had proved to be a crazy man. Filmmaker! Andrei worked as a busboy in a steak-and-lobster restaurant. He was almost forty, a student at the community college.

  That was when we asked if Lali was also a student there, and found out that she was.

  With Andrei, Meg’s good sense clicked in and she got away from him as fast as she could, though not before he wrote down her telephone number and started calling her apartment every hour. Then for some reason she agreed to go out with him, although she was already seeing Kevin.

  It was Andrei’s belief, as Meg assured us later it was the belief of many desperate citizens of Russia, bewildered and finally deluded by their own misfortunes since the collapse of communism, that the Jews were in charge and were intent on wiping Christianity from the face of the earth. Christians must marry and produce children as fast as they could. Andrei had seen the card on the bulletin board advertising Lali’s service and was ready on the spot.

  “I am a Buddhist,” Meg said, but in a friendly way. She let him film her. He did it with an expensive movie camera—a sixteen-millimeter, not a video camera. She didn’t speculate as to how he might have come by such a camera, a man who wore a bum’s old wing tip shoes, gaping at the seams. He had the camera with him at his first meeting with Meg; he lined up the attachments for her to see, taking them out of a case with sculpted compartments.

  How tender on the part of the male, Meg might have told her students, if she had been allowed to teach a course in her own field: this open desire to win the female. This display, like a bowerbird’s, this laying out of goods and assets. And the female approaching with some secret authority, to inspect what was spread before her.

  MEG INVITED US to dinner. Lali was already there, demure on the couch. She rose to her feet as we came in, a beautiful child dressed in a pale gray suit, slim as an incense stick. Actually she was twenty-seven and had left her family and her fiancé in Darjeeling five years before to visit a married cousin in Seattle, and stayed. Sitting beside Lali, Meg looked large and vague and worn.

  “Got many clients?” my husband said as soon as we sat down to dinner, before he had his napkin on his lap.

  “Just now I have forty-six,” Lali said, smiling at Meg, who must have predicted the question, and then soberly closing her dark lids big as awnings to think and holding up a finger. “Forty-seven.”

  “Uh-oh, that leaves somebody out in the cold,” Meg said. We all laughed.

  “So out of the forty-seven there were three who seemed to be young men who might have something in common with Meg,” said Sam with a sinister politeness.

  “Well, more than half are women. This is always the case, most regrettably. And while I am happy for women to meet, I am most strictly conventional in these introductions. Men to women. So the field is somewhat smaller for the women.”

  “How small?”

  “I have, just now, fifteen men.”

  “Out of which three, a fifth, might suit Meg? I guess that changes my sense that three is rather few.”

  “Oh, Dr. Wagner, all fathers are suspicious! Of course they are! This is your daughter!” I liked the way she said daughter. Doh-ta, with soft consonants, expressing a degree of tenderness. “And my teacher!” She glanced shyly at Meg. “But I am most cautious. Very, very particular. It is not all done with computers, don’t worry. It is done with the head”—she touched her smooth forehead—“the heart”—the neck
line of her pink silk shell—“and luck.” She rolled the startling whites of her eyes upward under their heavy, almost disabling net of lashes.

  “What about karma?” said Sam, who had had many discussions with Meg when she was becoming a Buddhist—a lax Buddhist at best, with all of her hopes—and had been reading up on Hinduism for the occasion of Lali’s visit. “Why would the person that Meg’s karma has earned her have to be found or chosen by somebody else?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Lali, with seeming pleasure. “But karma will allow us also to meet those who will guide us properly.”

  “Lali is a computer whiz as well as an A-student,” Meg said, as though she were making a match between us and Lali.

  “And so how is it that this disturbed Russian crept in?”

  “Andrei! He is someone I know! He was so surprised when the e-mail address from the bulletin was me, his friend from class!”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid I know him only well enough to like him. He is a silly boy, certainly, yes, in some ways, but he is quite trustworthy, of that I am sure.”

  “He climbed in the window of Meg’s apartment.”

  “Well, I don’t know, of course, but Russians are unlike Americans in many of their customs. That is impulsive, yes. But this boy has fallen in love. I can tell you I have heard nothing else from him for months and months but Meg, Meg, Meg.”

  “It doesn’t matter, really,” Meg said. “There’s nothing between us.” She turned to her father. “Seriously, think of how few people you meet who are instantly likable. Well? And these three, all of them—Lali is a magician.”

  We did not say that she, our daughter, found almost everybody likable.

  “And what about this farmer?” said Sam. “Hard to see how he got on the list.”