She sighs. “No, you want to go. Go. Bye.”
I feel a little bad leaving her there, but my feet are aching in these heels and I know Jonathan has had a long day. It’s time to leave. In the cab on the way to his apartment, I slink down in my seat and nestle my head into his chest. I listen to his heartbeat. My eyelids grow heavy and I can feel myself slipping into a content sleep. Everything—finally—is perfect.
— Chapter 5 —
There’s a Tinder message from Adam waiting for me when I wake up in Jonathan’s bed on Monday morning. Jonathan rolls over to shut off his iPhone alarm and groans a slurred, “Mmmrrph.” He’s not a morning person. Usually, he hits snooze once or twice, but he must have an early conference call, because he actually crawls out of bed and slumps off to the shower.
His apartment is a one-bedroom in the West Village with a clear view of One World Trade Center. There’s a Métro map of Paris Scotch-taped to the back of his door—a souvenir from our semester abroad—and a high-tech Swedish mattress piled with a rumpled navy duvet. His diploma is propped up on a bookcase jammed with econ textbooks and his old comic book collection. A blue bottle of sea-salt cologne, the gold watch he inherited from his grandfather, and his stack of work and personal phones are splayed out on his nightstand.
I don’t hate mornings like Jonathan does, but I’m also not used to working at 6:45 a.m.—which I guess is technically what Tindering with Adam constitutes.
I see you’re a TLC fan. What else should I know about you, besides your impeccable taste in music?
You know, the funny thing about swooning is that it can happen even when you’re horizontal in bed. Your boyfriend’s bed. This is just harmless, work-related flirting. Adam picked up on the “no scrubs” reference, and that’s kind of enlightened for a dude. On the “what else should I know about you” front, I should probably tell him that I’m a matchmaker, but I’m not sure how to drop that into the conversation. I really need him for Mindy, and I don’t want to scare him off.
I screenshot the message and send it to Caroline for help, but she won’t be up for another three or four hours. Later today I have a meeting at Bliss with all the matchmakers, so I can ask for their advice on how to deal with Adam. I have time to kill while Jonathan is in the shower, so I get lost Instagram-stalking a girl I know from NYU who’s spending her summer hopping between Ibiza and Geneva as the nanny for a European royal family. She looks tan. I’m jealous.
That’s when I hear the click of the bathroom door. Water droplets are sprinkled across Jonathan’s shoulders and trickle down toward the white towel wrapped around his narrow waist. I press my phone screen to my chest and sit up in bed.
“Guess what happened while you were in the shower.”
“What?”
“I got my first Tinder message from the guy I want for Mindy!”
“Hey, nice!”
He pulls a navy suit and one of eight identical white button-downs—the non-iron kind, since his mom no longer does that for him—out of the closet and drops them on the bed. He removes his towel. He still looks fantastic, of course, but a year of working late nights with no time for the gym and a corporate allowance have filled out his lanky frame.
“You know, it’s kind of hot imagining other men drooling over you online.” He shakes his head and grins.
I don’t know what to say about that, but I don’t like the look in his eye. “Don’t jinx this for me.”
“I want to see who’s picking up my girl on Tinder,” he says, gesturing for my phone.
I hand it to him and bite my lip. He eyes my meager list of matches and toggles over to Adam’s profile, cocking his head to the side.
“Eh. Not sure about this one. I mean, I guess his grandma seems nice.”
“What’s wrong with him? He’s adorable for thirty-three.”
“He looks sort of . . . liberal artsy?”
I cross my arms over my chest and roll my eyes. “What do you know about picking up straight dudes?”
“Hey, you could be right.” He holds up a charcoal gray striped tie and a solid blue one. “Which do you like better?”
I select the gray one. I’m mildly annoyed that Jonathan doesn’t approve of Adam. I’m already anxious enough about meeting with Mark and going to the company-wide meeting at Bliss later today; Jonathan’s lack of enthusiasm about Adam just makes me feel worse.
I freshen up with the toothbrush I keep at his place, wriggle into jeans and tank top, and tame my hair into a ponytail. Jonathan shrugs into his suit jacket, dropping his iPhone, company-issued BlackBerry, and wallet into his pockets. He pats himself down to make sure he’s remembered everything.
“Alexa, lights off,” he instructs his Amazon Echo. He breezes out the front door. “Sasha, let’s go,” he calls in the same tone of voice.
We take the elevator from his apartment to the lobby. Outside, there’s a slow-moving crowd of tourists that clogs both sidewalks. He grabs my hand and pulls me quickly through the mass; his legs aren’t even that much longer than mine, but I almost always have to run to keep up with him. He has no patience for anyone who moves slower than several light-years per second.
When we reach the subway, I wish him good luck dodging his managing director’s misplaced anger today—apparently, divorce is a bitch. He wishes me good luck with Mark.
Jonathan is at the bottom of Goldman Sachs’s totem pole, which means his Very Important Job demands his attention from the minute he wakes up until he crashes after midnight. Technically, he just manipulates Excel spreadsheets and creates detailed PowerPoints, but the real work is to look as busy and stressed as possible whenever he’s in view of his boss—which, because of the office’s open floor plan, is always. That means he gets in early, stays late, and never, ever, ever texts out in the open. I hate not talking to him during the day. Even when I do get to see him, he emails his boss from bed. Sometimes, when I’m trying to talk to him, he gets this detached look in his eyes and it’s obvious he’s obsessing about work instead of me. Dating a banker isn’t for everybody, but I wouldn’t date just any banker. The moments in which Jonathan can slide out of work mode and back into his old self—the nerd I fell in love with—make all the sacrifices worth it.
We step off the train at Chambers Street and let the subway doors snap shut behind us. We navigate through the underbelly of the station, paddling through the stream of sweaty commuters, all Connecticut dads wielding briefcases and young people in stiff blazers.
Amid the crowd of New Yorkers and tourists and halal carts, he grabs me around my waist and kisses me, shutting out the rest of the world. I savor being the center of his attention like this. Every kiss is like him affirming yes, I choose you.
Jonathan heads to work, and I walk to Starbucks to meet Mark. I’m overwhelmed as soon as I enter. This particular location is surrounded by several investment banks, law offices, and consulting firms, and by a quick visual estimate, a half dozen customers could be Mark. When it comes down to it, what’s really the difference between one dark-haired guy in a suit and the next? I get in line and gingerly tap the man in front of me on the shoulder and hope it’s him. He turns around, and a look of recognition flickers in his eyes.
“Mark?”
He looks slightly embarrassed to be here, but extends his hand to give mine a firm shake. Mercifully, he looks almost exactly like he does in his photos. Online, he claims to be five-eleven, but I’d eyeball him at an inch or two shorter than that. I make a mental note of his fib. We order coffee and he chooses a table toward the back, away from the mob of men in suits. He hunches over the table, shoulders inching toward his ears, and interlaces his thick fingers.
“So, what’s the deal here?”
I launch into my spiel, explaining how Bliss works and why I thought he might be a good fit for my client, keeping Mindy anonymous to protect her privacy.
“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?” I continue, pulling out my phone to take notes.
“Sur
e, but if you don’t mind, it’d be great if you could keep it down.” He cocks his head at the men in line. “My buddies, my coworkers . . . they’re here all the time. I don’t want them getting the wrong idea or anything. You know, I have no trouble getting girls on my own.”
I have no intention of humiliating him. But the thought that I could . . . I don’t often have that kind of power over these finance bro types. Well, one in particular. I lower my voice and ask him to describe his job. It’s a neutral, low-stress opener that softens people up before the tough questions.
He briefly explains his work at Goldman Sachs, declining to go into much detail. “You probably don’t care about all the nitty-gritty details, do you? They go right over most people’s heads.”
I offer him a tight smile. Hey, asshole, I’m capable of understanding your garbage finance job. I’ve had sex after hours in a Goldman Sachs conference room, okay? “You can tell me anything you’d like.” I don’t tell him about Jonathan.
“It’s mostly just assessing risk for mergers and acquisitions in European markets.”
“EMEA?” I ask. It’s pronounced like one word: eh-MEE-ah.
He looks at me with renewed interest. “Actually, yeah. How do you—”
“European, Middle Eastern, and African markets,” I say coolly. Jonathan assesses risk for the overseas subsidiaries of American corporations at Goldman Sachs. You don’t date an investment banker for two years and not pick up the lingo.
I turn to his life outside work. He reels off a list of hobbies—running along the Hudson River, playing with his nephews, trying out restaurants and bars around the city—that sounds directly regurgitated from his Bliss profile. Before I can ask him about the types of women he gravitates toward, he pops a morsel of banana bread into his mouth and keeps talking with his mouth full.
“Look, I’m a busy guy. I don’t have time to date for the sake of dating. So I’m selective about who I go out with—I only date extremely attractive women. Nines, tens. Eights if I’m slumming it.” He gives me a careful once-over, appraising my features. “She should be blond, very thin, very fit, very busty.” He mimes holding two heavy breasts with his sweaty hands. “No one over thirty. Oh, and she should make a decent salary on her own, unless she works in fashion or is a model, in which case I wouldn’t mind shelling out.”
Mark might want Barbie, but he’s certainly no Ken. I take in the bags under his eyes, the obnoxiously large Prada logo on one arm of his glasses. He’s not exactly bad-looking, but he’s delusional if he thinks an entire posse of Kate Upton look-alikes is dying to date him. I get the horrible feeling that he and my dad have the same taste in women.
“Um,” I say, taking an intentional slurp of my coffee to buy a few seconds of time. “Right, got it. You have very high standards. Any particular preferences regarding their personalities?”
“As long as they’re nothing like my ex,” he jokes, cracking a smile. He fills me in on a “crazy,” “emotional,” “irrational” woman. Then he drops the bomb.
“I’ve been on about one hundred and fifty Tinder dates since we split up seven months ago. On Saturdays, I stack them back-to-back: a coffee date, a happy hour date, a dinner date. I save the hottest for last—a late-night girl. So, who’d you have in mind for me?”
His words hang in the air for an uncomfortable second. Online, Mark had seemed passably handsome and suitable, and yet now I was sitting across from a Neanderthal. Was my judgment really that bad? When I applied for my job, I had wondered how Bliss stayed in business. Who would actually pay that much money for a stranger to sift through Tinder for them? But if the New York dating scene is full of guys like Mark, it makes sense. Of course successful women like Mindy would drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on the whisper-thin chance a matchmaker could actually find her dream guy. If the options are to fight off guys like Mark solo or to pay someone else to do it for her, Bliss is a no-brainer. How many times had I seen Caroline squirm while retelling the story of a downright disastrous date—the tone-deaf loser who talked about himself for a rambling forty-five minutes before asking what she did for a living, the drunk sad sack who projectile-vomited on her at a bar, the asshole who told a rape joke mid-hookup?
“Mark, it was a pleasure to meet you,” I finish, rising to stand and shake his hand. I borrow my next line directly from Penelope’s training and it flies out easily. “None of my clients meet your preferences at this time, but I’ll be sure to let you know if anyone comes up in the future.”
I suck in my stomach and wade through the pool of dad-bod finance guys to exit Starbucks with the most grace I can summon. I’m angry—not just at Mark, but at all the entitled men out there who must think and behave like Mark. If I weren’t happy with Jonathan, these are the kinds of duds I’d be dealing with. But I don’t have time to dwell, because I have to run downtown for the weekly matchmaker meeting at Bliss’s headquarters.
I arrive at the brownstone just in time. From what I gathered from training, the matchmakers meet to fill one another in on their progress, brainstorm potential matches together, and work out issues with clients. The grand dining room is filled with a dozen young women, most of whom I don’t know, none of whom are speaking to one another. Instead, they’re each attached to one or more devices: some crane over laptops, some tap out messages on iPhones, some pace the floor while talking. Penelope sits at the head of the table, eyes glued to her phone, managing to text while nodding along to something Elizabeth is saying. I don’t know where to sit, so I linger awkwardly in the doorway. No one seems to notice me.
I’ve been dreading this meeting since Penelope first mentioned it to me during training. I don’t like to meet new people in a big group like this. It’s nerve-racking. It reminds me of my biggest fear in high school, which was to walk into the cafeteria and not have anyone to sit with. Of course, I should be a pro at this by now, because I frequently didn’t have anyone to sit with, but the bubbling pit of frantic fear in the bottom of my stomach is still there.
One afternoon during sophomore year of high school, I made the mistake of lingering too long near the popular girls’ table. The ringleader of the group, a truly beautiful blond girl named Leah who would break her perfect ski-slope nose during an overzealous can-can kick at dance practice a year later, called me over and beamed up at me with her dentist’s daughter smile. She asked me to join her for lunch; dumbfounded, I put my tray down in the open space between her dumb hockey player boyfriend, Tom, and her friend Marissa. As I sat down, the girls started to snicker. I could feel my cheeks growing hot and the bottom of my stomach dropping out. What had I done wrong?
“Like we’d ever let some tacky trailer-park trash sit with us,” Leah sneered. Her lips curled around her teeth and made her look ugly.
She gave a slight nod to Tom, and he bumped my tray with his elbow just hard enough to topple it upside down into my lap. As pasta with tomato sauce seeped into the crotch of my white jeans, I saw Leah swiftly turn her head, withhold a giggle, and bite her lip, refusing to meet my gaze.
But this is a job. It’s not a catty high school. I take a deep breath and sit down in the open chair next to Elizabeth. She smiles and moves her laptop to make room for my things. I pull out my phone and text Caroline so it looks like I’m busy.
A minute later, Penelope summons everyone’s attention.
“Ladies, exciting news. I’d like to introduce you to the newest member of our team, Sasha Goldberg. She graduated from NYU this year and has a lot to bring to the table. She’s currently working with Mindy Kaplan.”
I give an awkward wave. The matchmakers quickly introduce themselves, then mostly snap back to their devices. Georgie is huddled in the corner of the room taking a phone call with one finger in her ear to block out the noise of the meeting.
Penelope gestures to the girl on her right, adorned in a gold cursive nameplate necklace that reads ALLISON.
“Want to take it away?”
Allison launches into an animated ra
nt.
“So, Craig went out last night—you all remember Craig, right? The tech guy with three Ivy League degrees who stormed out on his last date because poor Amanda only graduated from Duke?” The other matchmakers nod heavily. Allison swivels her laptop around to show his picture: he’s Asian, around thirty, and bundled up in a ski parka on a snowy slope. “Get this: he called Emily ‘potentially interesting’ and is considering seeing her again!”
Some of the matchmakers cheer. Allison beams.
“Wait, why is he only considering her again? Emily is great,” one girl pipes up. I think she said her name was Zoe. She has a cotton candy–colored lob and thick, sculpted brows, like she transplanted her head directly from Pinterest.
“Craig is superlogical.” Allison sighs. “He says he needs a few more days to process whether he thinks they’re a compatible match. He’s worried that she might live too far away for the relationship to work.”
Zoe wrinkles her nose and stops twirling her hair. “Don’t they both live downtown?”
“Yes, but he’s in Tribeca and she’s in the East Village, and there’s no direct subway route between the two.”
“That’s idiotic.”
“I know! Especially because she’s into him. She dug his intellect.”
“Allison, keep trying to persuade him to see Emily again,” Penelope says. “Craig is difficult. He’s not going to hit it off with many girls, and he shouldn’t ruin things with Emily if she likes him back. In the meantime, do you have any ideas for his next match?”
Allison groans and buries her face in her hands. “Ugh. I’ve been sending out messages on that Ivy League dating site, but no one’s biting. I went up to Columbia to see if Craig would think any of the grad students are cute, but he’s so particular. I want to swing by the Harvard Club later today, but I don’t think I’ll have time before six p.m. cocktails with my new client, Richard.”
Playing with Matches Page 5