Lessons in Duck Hunting

by Jayne Buxton

  Marina then embarks on her introductory monologue. It’s much the same speech she gave on the radio, but one hundred times more impactful because of her presence. She is tall and slim, and perfectly groomed, as you would expect. Her thick, blond hair falls elegantly below her shoulders like expensive velvet, and complements the velvet collar and cuffs of her chocolate brown cashmere sweater dress. Her brilliant white smile radiates success and confidence, and through some well-practiced delivery technique, seems to be directed specifically at me, along with each and every other woman in the room. We British just don’t do women like her.

  “So, there are three secrets to the success of The Proactive Partnership Program,” Marina is saying to a rapt audience. “The first is disciplined adherence to a method—and my method is based on the trusty four Ps of marketing success—Product, Packaging, Place and Promotion—plus four more I’ve added. The second is moral support, the support that I’m going to give you, and that you are all going to give each other. But the third secret is perhaps the most important of all, and it is sitting right in front of me. . . .”

  We all crane our necks to look at the carpet in front of the podium, trying to identify the third critical success factor for The Proactive Partnership Program.

  Marina continues, “And that secret is you. Each and every one of you. You have all come here this evening because you genuinely want to make a difference to your life. You are tired of being alone, and you have very cleverly come to the conclusion that once you reach a certain age in today’s world, you need to take considered action if you’re going to find someone to spend your life with. You are not looking for ordinary dinner dates, or casual sex. You are looking for Mr. Right. And I’m going to help you find him.”

  The room erupts into applause for the second time. It’s all so horribly un-English, but I find myself unable to sit back in a dignified manner while everyone else is engaging with Marina so enthusiastically, so I join in for the second wave of clapping.

  Again, Marina calms us all with a refined raising and lowering of her hands. It’s such a subtle movement that you couldn’t even really accuse her of imperiousness. “Now, we have some work to do this evening, ladies. I want us all to emerge from this first seminar with some clear action steps to do with refining the product and its packaging—that’s you—and prospecting—that’s practicing. But before we can do any of this, we need to do some planning. Planning is all about making The Proactive Partnership Program a priority and clearing the path for its success—what I call Dumping the Baggage.”

  Then Marina descends from the podium and moves toward the first row. “What I’d like you to do now is to gather together in small groups of five at the round tables you see all around the room. That’s right, you five from this row get together and go to table one, and so on. Then I want you to sit for thirty minutes as a group, each of you telling your tablemates why you came here tonight, and how you are going to demonstrate that this program is truly a top priority in your life.”

  Christ, I knew it would come to this, but I hadn’t thought it would come so soon. As the room becomes a jumble of bodies shuffling this way and that toward empty tables, I catch Mel’s eye, trying to roll my own eyes toward the heavens with sufficient subtlety that no one else notices.

  Predictably, I find myself seated at a table with the woman in the cream twin-set and the scary rail-thin one. Additions to our group from farther down the row are an athletic-looking woman with cropped blond hair, and a rather overweight, dark-haired woman in an ill-fitting rust-colored suit. (That will have to go, for a start.) Much to my surprise, and delight, we are joined at the last moment by the olive-skinned beauty with the trendy glasses. She must have found herself stranded as the rest of her row scattered to fill seats at available tables. Now at least this will be interesting, I think. I’m dying to know what a woman like her is doing in a place like this.

  It’s all rather awkward at the beginning. We sit smiling gormlessly at one another, occasionally looking around at other tables to see if they have started. Eventually, Marina taps cream twin-set on the shoulder and says, “Come on, ladies. What are you waiting for? You can’t find Mr. Right if you can’t get the basics right. ”

  So we begin. The kindly one in the twin-set, whose name is Angie, starts us off, recounting a tale of years spent working in the office of her brother’s building firm to support her two daughters, never meeting anyone of any consequence, and wondering to herself “Is this really all there is?” She tells the others what she had earlier told me: that her sister who lives in New York knows many American women who’ve had success with the help of Marina’s program, so she saved up her pennies to give it a try.

  The rail-thin Katherine is a forty-one-year-old actuary and has never been married. She figures The Proactive Partnership Program is her last chance at finding a partner with whom she can have a child. Nancy with the short blond hair came out as a lesbian two years ago, but has no idea about how to meet women. A friend of hers had seen a segment about Marina on Oprah (I knew it), and suggested she give it a go. The plump Louise is a mere child at twenty-nine. But she has never had a relationship. She doesn’t know if it’s her weight or her breath, but she’s beginning to worry. Her godmother sent her to this seminar.

  Then it’s time for the olive-skinned one to speak. Her name is Claudia, and she is, as I had guessed, of Spanish origin. “I am thirty-nine years old,” she says. “And I am fed up with waiting for the right man to come along. I was married in my twenties, but that was a disaster. I am a translator, and work on my own so I rarely have the chance to meet men. And I don’t know that many people here in England, so my chances of just happening upon the right person are very remote. So I thought, Fuck it! I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am too good to be going to waste. I am going to find a gorgeous, sexy man before I am forty!”

  Wow. What can you say to that? This is George’s Francesca all over again. Gutsy, exotic, beautiful. And no way going to seet in a dark room for the rest of her life. I am lost in admiration of her strength of feeling and her thoroughly unself-pitying attitude, when I realize that all eyes have turned to me. I am the last one, and must fess up.

  I stare at the crisp white tablecloth, twirling the slim, silver hotel supplied pencil over in my fingers like a baton, waiting for inspiration.

  I can’t possibly repeat the line about having been dragged here by a friend; it went down so badly with Angie the last time. And I decide that inventing a completely new persona for myself will be too complicated. It will tie me up in knots and I will surely blow my cover at some stage. (Particularly as I have noticed that the coffee break is actually one with wine and canapés.) Mel can call me Francesca for her story, and change a few details, but I am going to have to be myself.

  “My name is Ally,” I begin. “Alexandra James. I have two children, a boy and a girl. My husband and I were divorced over two years ago and I have only been out with two men since. These dates were such categorical disasters that I hardly dared answer the phone for months afterward. Since then it seems that I just don’t meet men. Or, not the right types anyway. For quite a long time I didn’t mind. But now I mind.” And then I add, because someone is surely going to ask me why, suddenly, I mind, “My ex-husband has met someone he’s quite serious about, and I’m afraid he’s going to marry her.”

  Angie flinches in sympathy. “My ex married the month after our divorce came through. It was horrible,” she says.

  Claudia touches my arm and announces to the group “My ex has been married for ten years. The men always get remarried first, you know. Personally I think it’s a sign of weakness. They can’t stand being on their own. Look at Paul McCartney and how quickly he got hitched to that Heather woman. When the love of his life had been gone hardly a year.”

  “We’d better move on to the next topic,” interjects Katherine, who’s clearly something of a stickler for a smoothly run process. “We’ve only got ten minutes left.”
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br />   So we move on to topic two: how are we going to demonstrate that The Proactive Partnership Program is a priority for us. Personally, I’m not sure how anyone with any obligations, such as represented by a couple of children, could possibly rank such a program as their highest priority. But for some reason they are all looking at me, and it’s clear I will have to go first. It’s also clear that I’ll have to demonstrate more commitment than I’d given Mel before I agreed to come; now that I’m here, remaining completely detached seems somehow churlish, like a betrayal of everyone else in the room. So I solemnly promise to attend all the seminars and slavishly read my notes afterward.

  I can see that this impresses no one. Louise vows to devote five hours per week to the program; Katherine pledges ten percent of her income for six months; Claudia announces that she’s going to make sure she goes out in the evening at least twice a week, even if it means eating in restaurants alone. Biting her lip as she considers these testimonials to commitment, Angie undertakes to dedicate an hour of every day to the tasks spelled out by The Proactive Partnership Program. That’s quite something for someone who returns home from working full-time in a construction office every day to a second shift cooking meals and doing laundry for two pre-pubescent girls.

  Marina delivers me from too much cross-examination by gently placing her hand on Claudia’s shoulder and asking us all to return to our seats. Once we are all settled she asks one of the groups to volunteer the contents of their roundtable for plenary consumption. Thankfully, no one from my group puts up their hand, and Marina chooses a group from row four, who (quite proudly, I think) move up to the front to tell their stories. These women are not all that different from the ones in my group, in the end: a couple afraid of eternal spinsterhood, and three determined to bounce back from divorces; some with children, some without. But one, whose name is Caroline, makes a demonstration of commitment that rather shocks us all: she is going to give up her job for six months in order to follow the program religiously and devote all of her time to finding the perfect mate.

  When we break for wine the room is abuzz with conversation. In the small group in which I’m huddled (comprising Claudia, Angie and myself, Katherine and Louise having temporarily attached themselves to another group, perhaps in registration of their disgust at my paltry offering earlier), the conversation is about Caroline. We can’t agree on whether she is mad or courageous. She’s clearly of independent means, or very good at saving. But will her gamble pay off? Is it the right thing to do anyway? Any man who gets wind of the fact that a woman is hunting him down on a full-time basis will surely run a mile. Won’t he?

  As we ponder the sagacity of Caroline’s decision, I spot Mel in a group of four on the other side of the room. She’s in full interview mode, looking earnestly into the eyes of a very tall woman, lapping up every word. Every now and again she scribbles something in her scrappy little notebook, then lifts her head in readiness for further gripping confessions.

  When we have each consumed a couple of glasses of chardonnay and several vol-au-vents, we are asked to take our seats for a small lecture on baggage. Marina tells us what baggage is; basically, it’s anything that gets in the way of our thinking we can find a partner. It could be a long-held worry about being too fat, or a fear of relationships resulting from having been brutally bruised by the last one. She explains that before she met her husband she used to fear that she was too clever and bookish to be attractive to men (apparently, Marina has a doctorate in behavioral psychology and a law degree); it wasn’t until she “owned” her brains, and dumped the baggage associated with them, that she was open enough to have a relationship with the man who turned out to be her husband. As Marina recounts this story, I happen to glance at Katherine, who is nodding with her mouth slightly agape, as if she’s had an epiphany.

  Predictably, Marina asks if anyone would like to volunteer their baggage for our inspection. I’m almost certain that Katherine will raise her hand, but she keeps it firmly in her lap, and in the end we hear from Louise and the woman with the unsightly red perm I’d spotted earlier. Louise says that she thinks her weight, or rather how she feels about her weight, might be her baggage. Marina responds to this confession by offering a short anecdote about an overweight woman who attended her seminars in Washington, and who managed to hook up with a delightful—if slightly older and less socially mobile—man who adored her despite her extra pounds. The moral of the story, says Marina, is to love yourself and make the very best of yourself (of which more later apparently). According to Marina, if you’re carrying under ten extra pounds, you can absolutely forget about it, because no one will notice. If you’re between ten and fifty pounds over your ideal weight, you might want to think about a diet and exercise plan, but you don’t have to. Learning to love your body and dressing to flatter it can be just as effective.

  The permed redhead, who introduces herself as Karen, says, in a voice so frail it is barely audible, that her baggage is chronic shyness. She is so fearful of having to engage in conversation with people, let alone a relationship, that she usually avoids social interaction altogether. Never short of an inspiring example to suit any requirement, Marina tells us about a chronically shy woman who drew strength from amateur acting classes and insists that Karen is already halfway to burying her shyness baggage as a consequence of merely having turned up at the Savoy this evening. Upon hearing this news, I swear Karen begins to stand just a little taller.

  The evening is drawing to a close, and Marina spends the last of it spelling out what we all have to do before the next seminar. She gives us three tasks, which I dutifully scribble down on the back of the notes we’ve been handed:

  Planning: Write all of our own baggage on a piece of paper and bury it somewhere. Literally.

  Product and Packaging: Organize own rebranding/repackaging session. See extensive notes in take-home pack.

  Prospecting: Take some test runs with some Duck Decoys. Three if possible.

  The Duck Decoy business is the bit that initially goes over my head, until Marina explains that this is merely a matter of arranging dates with three men who we would not ordinarily think of as our type. Men whom we might even reject outright as completely counter to type. The point of this exercise, apparently, is to open our minds to new sorts of people, and even new sides of ourselves, and to remind ourselves that a book should never be judged by its cover. Who knows, says Marina in conclusion, you might even discover that one of your Duck Decoys is the real thing!

  ON THE TUBE journey home I find myself squashed into a seat next to an overweight city type, slumped half asleep in his seat with his head lolling forward at regular intervals. Various of his body parts are oozing over the armrest and into my space, forcing me to lean away from him and uncomfortably close to one half of a couple who appear to be under the impression that no one else can actually hear the wet, smacking noises their lips are making as they snog under the bright fluorescent lights of the carriage.

  I feel a vibration inside my bag, and fish my phone out to find a text from Mel, whom I had studiously avoided on leaving the Savoy.

  WASNT THAT A HOOT. CAROLINE PERSON A BIT SCARY THO.

  CANT WAIT 2 TELL U WOT I HEARD. CALL ME 2MORROW.

  Hoot is not the word I would have chosen. Amusing, often toecurlingly embarrassing, sometimes touching, occasionally uplifting. These are more like the words I would choose. I feel conflicted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, and definitely don’t like, and I can see my commitment to giving up on Marina’s program after two seminars weakening, if not disappearing altogether. Much as I want to remain disconnected from the whole experience, an ironic bystander doing her duty in the name of good copy, I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage it. It’s not that I need something like this to help me find the right person. It’s not as if I would ever take it seriously myself. But there are all these other people involved, four of whom I feel I know, if just a little. Giving up on the whole thing, or worse, standing aloof from it, woul
d smack of capriciousness and disloyalty.

  Clearly, there’s nothing to do but get on with my homework and keep up a bloody good front.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 11

  A BURIAL

  We are all three munching our way through bowls of Cheerios, when Millie announces that she doesn’t want to go to school. When I ask why, she tells me yet another tale of her suffering at the hands of a group of seven-year-old girls. Yesterday they apparently left her to take the blame for leaving all the netballs rolling around the playground in the rain, and Miss Penwith, the P.E. teacher, swallowed their story unquestioningly. Millie was distraught. It was not just the telling off by Miss Penwith. Worse, though she can’t fully articulate it now, was the betrayal by the other girls.

  What is it about her, I know she is wondering, that invites this kind of nastiness? Is it her nature or theirs that is to blame? In moments of weakness I wonder these things too. But most of the time I am certain that the problem lies in the group, and the cruel dynamic that seems to be being bred there.

  I don’t want to be an interfering mother, but I vow to see the headmistress if anything like this should recur. In the meantime, I tell Millie that if she knows she did nothing wrong then that is what is important. People will see the truth in the end. Where do we get these platitudes from, I wonder? Is there anything in the adult world that has shown them to be true, or are we just building up a horrible disappointment for our children to face in the days following their twenty-first birthdays?

  I persuade Millie to go to school by promising that I will leave work early to collect her, and that she and I will have a special girls’ afternoon while Jill looks after Jack. (It is only when I say these two names in quick succession that I wish I had chosen a babysitter with a name like Carmen.) At Millie’s request, this will involve a trip to WH Smith to purchase a new pencil case (bright pink being the desired hue), followed by hot chocolate and banana cake at Mortons.