Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

A year earlier, I had agreed to marry CJ.

Riley liked to say that he fell in love with me before he even met me, on the day he saw my photograph on my mother’s desk at the Chamber office. He said he saw the picture and stopped dead in his tracks and thought, That is the woman I am going to marry. He said that his heart had never been broken before but the closest he’d ever come was when he found out I was engaged.

My feelings for Riley developed more gradually, which he understood. My emotional plate was full-with CJ, with my mother, with Clendenin. I know that I love him, I know he is the kindest, most delightful, most handsome, most talented surfing dentist on earth and that I would be nuts to let him go-but I’m not ready to talk about marriage. Especially not this weekend. We have agreed to see what the summer brings-we will be together on Nantucket-and maybe, maybe, I’ll move to Philadelphia with him in the fall.

My mother would be ecstatic about that.

After the tailgate picnic was broken down and all the antique cars headed back out the Milestone Road toward town, I waved goodbye to Box. He was going to the Boarding House with the Levisons. In the morning, we would have coffee together and then I would drive him to the airport-the way my mother always had-so he could head back to Cambridge.

Clen had ridden out to the Daffodil festivities on his bicycle, and he was getting ready to ride home. I was worried about Clen in a way that I was not worried about Box. I left Riley to pack up our picnic and help Celerie with the last of her tasks, and I walked over to talk to Clen just as he was climbing onto his bicycle.

I said, “What are you up to tonight?”

He said, “Bourbon. Fried rice if I feel ambitious. Sox game on the radio, maybe.”

“Riley and I are breaking out the grill,” I said. “Ribs. Will you join us?”

He shook his head. “You’re sweet to ask, but I’m fine.”

“Are you fine?” I asked. There had been a couple of nights when I had gone to Clen’s cottage and we’d both drunk bourbon and one or the other of us had broken down crying because we just missed her so much. Where had she gone? She had been here, so alive, the most alive person either of us had ever known, and now she was gone. Snap of the fingers: poof, like that.

When it was Clen who broke down crying-great big heaving sobs that sounded like the call of some enormous animal, a moose, or a whale-I had thought, That is my father, crying over my mother. It was true, but it was so weird that I had to say it multiple times to make it sink in. What would our lives have been like if he had stayed on Nantucket and raised me? Or if my mother had been brave enough to go to Thailand?

“Agnes,” Clen said. And I knew something was coming.

“What?”

“I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “Running the Singapore desk for the Washington Post. It’s an assignment I’ve wanted my entire career. The job comes with a two-bedroom flat, just off the Orchard Road.” He must have noticed the look on my face, because he started talking more quickly. “Elizabeth Jennings mentioned my name to someone who owed her husband, Mingus, a favor or three. She feels guilty, I think, about the way she treated your mother.”

“You’re accepting favors from Elizabeth Jennings?” I said.

“It’s the job I’ve always wanted,” Clen said. “I’ll grow old drinking Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel.” He smiled weakly. “Agnes, I can’t stay here without her. Every day is excruciating. I can’t stay here without her, and I have nowhere else to go.”

Leaving me, I thought, when we had just found each other. That part of the world would swallow Clen up for another twenty-seven years, and I would never see him again.

He said, “I agreed to the job on the condition that I be allowed to come back to Nantucket for the month of August every year. It’s monsoon there; most of the country takes a vacation. So you’ll get me thirty-one days a year, when I’ll be at your disposal, I promise.”

I felt my face soften. Every August together was a good compromise.

He said, “And you and Riley can come visit. You can come to Singapore on your honeymoon!”

At that moment, Riley swooped up behind me and hugged me with such gusto, he picked me right up off the ground. “Did somebody say ‘honeymoon’?” he said.

Couple #44: John Boxmiller Beech and Miranda Gilbert. Together.

Box: There was always work. Harvard, my textbook, the secretary of the Treasury, who was now bandying my name around for Federal Reserve chairman, as the current chairman had been caught in a scandal and would most likely end up resigning. I would teach my seminar at the London School of Economics in June, and I was to be the keynote speaker at the annual Macro conference, this year held in Atlanta.

It was on a whim that I found myself in New York City. I had a former student named Edward Jin who had abandoned graduate work in economics in order to train as a chef. Apparently he was quite talented and successful; he had secured enough backing to open his own restaurant, called The Dividend, on the Bowery, and he invited me to the soft opening. It just so happened that I had nothing scheduled the weekend of this invitation, and I was partial to Manhattan in the springtime. I called Edward Jin and told him I would attend, and I booked a junior suite at the St. Regis.

The soft opening at The Dividend was an intimate affair-thirty or so friends and family and investors of Edward Jin’s gathered in the bar area, which featured wood floors salvaged from an Amish farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a chandelier made from an old wagon wheel, and a lot of copper pots and candlelight and hand-muddled cocktails made from ingredients like kale and fresh ginger. This was the way with many restaurants now-farm-to-table, organic, produce and meats assiduously researched and hand-sourced. It was good and fine and noble, but I missed Dabney’s cooking.

I knew no one except Edward Jin and he was, naturally, too busy for anything but a warm hello and a single introduction-to his married sister who was a stay-at-home mother in Brooklyn. I mentioned that I had taught Edward at Harvard; she responded that the family had all been stunned when Edward was admitted to Harvard since he’d been rejected from Brown, Duke, and Dartmouth, and I laughed and said that yes, college admissions were arbitrary and capricious.

After that, we had pretty much exhausted our conversational possibilities. I panicked and wished fervently for Dabney, who used to be able to carry on a conversation with an ox or a doorstop.

I was saved, however, because at that moment, Miranda Gilbert walked in.

If I say that my heart stopped or my breath caught I would sound like the heroine in one of the English novels Dabney so loved to read. Leaping heart, snagged breath, I wasn’t sure how to describe it but something happened when I saw Miranda.

What was she doing here?

Then of course I realized that she had been Edward Jin’s TA for more than one of my courses, and I remembered that they had hit it off rather well and used to meet for beers at the Rathskeller, which I did not approve of since she was, after all, responsible for giving Edward Jin his grades.

I was initially consumed with jealousy. Were Miranda and Edward now seeing each other?

Miranda gasped when she saw me and came over right away. The lighting was low in the restaurant but I thought she looked flushed.

“Box,” she said. “My God, I had no idea you would be here.”

“Nor I you,” I said. I kissed her cheek while holding both her hands. She smelled like Miranda always smelled, like an apricot rose, or something as delicate and lovely.

She said, “I was so sorry to hear about Dabney. You got my card?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I had gotten many, many cards; most of them, including Miranda’s, I had left unopened because it was too difficult to read them. I put them in a larger envelope and forwarded them to Agnes.

“She was a special woman,” Miranda said. “She had a gift for love, the way other people have an eye for color.”

This was so true, it made my eyes burn, and I blinked rapidly.

“Yes,” I said. “She did. She was always right about love. It was uncanny.”

Miranda and I switched place cards at the long harvest table so that we could sit next to each other, and we spent the evening in a bubble of great food and better wine and esoteric conversation that left everyone else at the table out.

I said, “Have you seen much of Edward, since you’ve been in New York?”

“Edward?” she said, as if she didn’t know whom I was talking about.

“Our host,” I said. “The chef.”

Miranda laughed. “No,” she said. “I haven’t seen him at all before tonight. I didn’t even know he was in the city. He tracked me down on Facebook.”

I felt happy to hear this. Miranda and Edward were not together! But this didn’t mean she was available.

“Are you…dating anyone?” I asked. “Has anyone replaced the good doctor?”

She sipped her wine and nudged her glasses up her nose in a way I found bewitching.

“No,” she said.

Dabney had said Miranda Gilbert, but I hadn’t listened.

I hadn’t listened, Dabney, because I was married to you. You you you.

But I heard Dabney’s words now: Miranda Gilbert. She loves you, Box.

Dabney was never wrong. She had the gift of love, the way some people have an eye for color.

At the end of the evening, I helped Miranda on with her coat.

I said, “Another drink?”

“I’m sorry to say I’m tuckered out, Box. And I have an early meeting tomorrow. I’m afraid I must head home.”

“No!” I cried out. Showing my hand dreadfully, I knew.

She smiled in a way that thrilled me. “Take me to dinner tomorrow night, will you? Someplace just the two of us?”

I said that I would.

And I did.

And somewhere in the atmosphere, or dare I say the heavens, the spirit of another woman was sighing in bliss at being right, once again.

The late spring night was mild, so Clendenin stood out on the deck of the ferry, where he could watch the lights of Nantucket recede.

He would spend the night in Boston, then fly the following day to London, and then on to Singapore. He had packed one trunk, which would precede him, and he traveled now with a large rolling suitcase, easily manipulated with one hand.

Singapore. He couldn’t believe it. He had waited so long, to no avail, it had always been just out of reach, and now it was like a golden apple that had dropped into his hand.

He had called Elizabeth Jennings to thank her, and she had said, “I had nothing to do with it. I only mentioned to Jack that I knew you. He took the ball and ran with it. You can hardly be surprised, Clen. You have a Pulitzer. Any foreign desk in the world would be lucky to have you.”

Gracious of her to say. He doubted it was true, but he wasn’t going to argue.

Singapore was his perfect match.

He recalled a similar ferry ride, over a quarter century earlier. A young man, twenty-three years old, with two healthy, strong arms, a sense of adventure, and a big dream, was heading out to conquer the world.

He had waved madly at Dabney and had called out I love yous.

Dabney had told him, again and again, We are a perfect match. No matter what happens, we are going to end up together.

End up together. Yes, he supposed they had.

The foghorn sounded its long, lonely note. Dabney was gone. He would forever dwell in the prison of her absence.

But he had been so lucky. She had granted him a second chance: six months of the purest happiness he’d ever known. He pictured Dabney pulling into his driveway in the Impala and climbing the three steps to the porch of his cottage. Her hands on the sides of his face. Her smile.

In his jacket pocket, Clen fingered Dabney’s pearls. She had given them to him in her final days. When he first held them, they were still warm from her neck.

Keep these, she said. And think of me.

As if anything else were possible.

Reagan Arthur: I wish there were words complex and fabulous enough to describe my gratitude that an intellect and a sensibility such as yours exists in this world. Thank you!

Michelle Aielli: To paraphrase Allison Pearson, I Don’t Know How You Do It. You are my publicist, my keeper, and my friend. Thank you!

Michael Carlisle and David Forrer: My favorite quote of 2013 was “Now that’s good agenting!” You are both indescribably dear to me. Thank you!