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Inadvertent Matchmaker Seeks a Love of Her Own

Once upon a time, in a gritty, rent-stabilized land called the East Village of the late ’90s and early aughts, I introduced all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight guy friends to all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight girl friends, and they all got married and lived happily ever after.

This is the story of how I came to be known, far and wide, as the “East Village Yenta.”

Introducing people IRL — old school — was considered to be something of a major mitzvah even in those days. One of the harsher ironies of living in New York City has always been that even with the crushing multitudes of people, it can be incredibly lonely. It can seem impossible to find a mate. If you think meeting someone in New York City is hard now, I promise you, it was infinitely harder in the days before Facebook and Instagram and other social media made it standard to know pretty much everything about a person before ever meeting them.

So many single people, but so little context for knowing who was single, or for simply introducing yourself and striking up a conversation. How would you know whether the cute guy on the other side of the horseshoe bar at Vazac’s, who sort of smiled at you, or the one playing pool at Sophie’s, had a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend? Or if his relationship status might fall into the category of “It’s complicated?” In those days, it was particularly helpful to have an informed human vector pointing you in the direction of that special someone.

For a handful of couples in my East Village days, I was that vector. I tried to be subtle about it, creating low-stakes alternatives to that invariably awkward, inhumane fix-up standby, the blind date. I’d throw big parties, cramming forty or more guests into my un-renovated run-down East 13th Street tenement, for the express purpose of introducing just two of them in a low-key, dignified manner. I’d sneak a surprise guest into the exclusive weekly poker game I was part of, or into casual dinners with the group I came to think of as my East Village family, at 7A, or at one of the cheap sushi places in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I acted on my instincts almost unconsciously, making a last-minute phone call to invite someone along to a bar where I was meeting others, and it would invariably lead to a love connection. But in all situations, whether I was acting deliberately or inadvertently, there was one constant: I was always the one person in the room who knew both parties.

* * *

Mine was a full-service matchmaking enterprise. Not only would I introduce my friends, but in some cases, early in their courtships, before both parties were ready to considered themselves part of an “item,” I’d even chaperone them. Sure, I’ll be a third wheel on your road trip to a sleep-inducing community theater production of The Cherry Orchard in Bristol, Pennsylvania so that you don’t have to call it a “date.” Also included in the package was relationship advice for the unattached and lovelorn, which I’d provide for free. Ironic, considering that I myself was pretty consistently unattached and lovelorn, living, as I did, on a perpetual emotional roller coaster ride, courtesy of a coterie of ambivalent man-children, most of whom were complete jerks.

Occasionally my friends would try to return the favor. But while I loved introducing couples, I, myself, hated being fixed up. First of all, none of my friends were insecure or co-dependent enough to go to the ridiculous trouble I had for them, so awkward blind dates seemed to be the only option.

Second of all, in most cases, they wanted to introduce me exclusively to short dudes they had no one else to set up with. I’m a hair under five feet myself, so I’m not in any position to rule anyone out based on their height. But that’s not what this was about. I never had a problem with short guys. I dated men who were 5’2” and 5’3”. I also dated guys who were over six feet. The problem wasn’t the men’s lack of stature. The problem was, more often than not, it was the only thing we had in common. Having already logged more than my share of meals with short men who had no sense of humor, or had never read a book, I just wasn’t interested.

Third of all, in the cases where my friends did have great guys of any height that they wanted me to meet, I was forced to confront my aversion to…great guys of any height. No, not for me, the smart, interesting, kind, funny type! Let the other girls have them! I was in the market for a different breed of suitor: the rakishly cute, brooding, unreliable, sometimes mean, always broke, and decidedly broken species known as The Beautiful Mess, native to regions like the ’90s East Village. The anti-suitor. As if it isn’t already difficult enough in New York City to find someone to settle down with; try limiting yourself to the ones who are just not that into settling down. Or you. Or both. Stubbornly, I clung to this ridiculous preference way past the age when most women outgrow it.

If I was stuck in that groove way longer than I should have been, I hold New York City somewhat accountable. It provided me with too many compelling distractions from my misery and loneliness. New York is often anthropomorphized as a bad boyfriend who’s both hard to keep and hard to leave. But for me New York was more like my gay boyfriend, who wasn’t going to give me certain things you’d want in a relationship, but who would comfort me and cheer me up with shiny diversions when I most needed it. So much to see! Art, music, street fashion, architecture, crazy tourists. I’d walk around the lower tip of Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon after a bad date Saturday night, intrigued at every turn — interesting buildings, shops, a veritable UN of cuisines, people, people, people. The blessed profusion of variety tranquilized me. Afterward, my mind could remain occupied and my spirits high, at least until the man-child du jour would do or say something just subtly rejecting enough to throw me off balance. Where another woman might recognize this as a good stop to get off that train, I’d instead expend tremendous energy trying to decipher the mixed messages, and contorting myself into someone I imagined they’d be more interested in.

* * *

The people around me got tired of my tedious suffering before I did. The last straw was my 34th birthday dinner friends put together for me in October, 1999 at Jules on St. Marks Place. Bill, the on-again-off-again boyfriend I was, for some reason, living with at the time, had said no when I asked if he wanted to join my birthday celebration. My friends wouldn’t stand for it, though. They took matters into their own hands, calling Bill and persuading him to surprise me at the restaurant for cake.

Dinner and dessert came and went. We sat and sat. I wondered why my friends all kept looking to the door but not getting up and heading toward it. My friend Donna grabbed her Nokia cell phone and stepped outside. No one spoke. When Donna came back in, she couldn’t hide her anger.

“Bill is blowing us off,” she said. “He said he was going to surprise you and come for dessert. I’m so sorry, Sari.”

I hung in with Bill for another seven or eight months. I avoided my friends. I didn’t want to be lectured. I was crumbling inside, and I didn’t want them to see. And I wasn’t ready to walk away.

It hadn’t occurred to me that my friends might have been avoiding me, too.

“Buttons,” my friend Kevin said to me when I called him one afternoon — he was using one of his many affectionate nicknames for me — “I don’t know if you’ve noticed that I haven’t been spending so much time with you these days. It’s just that I can’t watch anymore as you put yourself through the ringer with guys like Bill. I can’t watch you as you keep staying.”

After a moment, I said, “I’m working on it, Kevin.” It came out more defensive than I wanted, but I didn’t know how to fix that, and I couldn’t say more words without crying. As soon as we hung up, the tears came rushing.

What Kevin had said hurt so much, but it was what I needed to hear. It was one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me.

It got me to dump Bill for good, and to then find myself a good New York shrink. And while I was busy getting my shit together, I made my next match, almost inadvertently.

I got a call from a guy I knew who’d moved from New York to Montréal the year before. His girlfriend, a lovely young woman I’d met at their going-away party across town at the Ear Inn, was now moving back to New York City. Without him. They’d broken up. Her name was Emily, and she was this pixie-ish, booksish dancer who also liked to write. She said she had just begun her first novel.

Emily was looking for a room to rent, and it so happened my friend Dave was looking for a roommate. I called them both and invited them to meet me for dinner at Jeoaldo, the cheap sushi place on East Fourth. When I hung up, the gears in my brain started turning. I made a third phone call, this one to Kevin.

Kevin and Emily married two years later.

As a daughter of clergy who rejects religion, I probably have no business invoking a Jewish adage about matchmakers. But it’s said that if you introduce three couples who go on to marry, a place is reserved for you at the highest level of Heaven. (Of course Jewish Heaven has different levels that you have to strive toward!) Kevin and Emily were couple number three for me.

Was it just a coincidence that after I introduced them — and, granted, after $20,000 worth of shrink sessions — that I then found my mate? That job I had to contract out; Nerve Personals served as my yenta — with the help of my gay boyfriend, New York City.

After we’d communicated intermittently on Nerve Personals for about six months but never met, I spotted Brian on East 7th Street, between Avenues C and D one morning when I was out jogging. He was standing behind his car, making sure it was outside the no-parking zone in front of a church entrance. I recognized him from his dating profile photo, and had enough context, obviously, to know he was single and in the market for a girlfriend. So, I said hello.

On February 5th, 2018, we celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary.

I’ll be forever grateful to New York City and its Alternate Side Parking Rules, and to Nerve Personals. And to Kevin, for a gift even greater than the mitzvah of matchmaking.

A Finder, No Longer a Keeper

Jenny Klion | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Twenty years ago, in the parking lot of a Cirque du Soleil show at Santa Monica Beach, I saw in the dust an antique diamond engagement ring. Of course I picked it up, all tiny diamond and huge ring size, but the mystery took hold of me: who was its owner, what was her story, and did she mean to throw away her marital promise ring?

“Look at this!” I said to my new husband James. We’d only recently found each other, were instantly simpatico, and had married at nearly first sight.

“Are you sure you want to mess with that?” he asked. “That’s somebody’s magic, you know, sitting in the dirt.” He was always talking about somebody’s magic, and messing with it.

“I do!” I gleaned, and pocketed the sweet thing.

Six months later, back in New York City, I was lying on the floor in a group hippie singing class, engaged in a visualization exercise about some inner artistic journey. Our instructions were to invent a guide-type helper for ourselves, and at the end, give that guide a gift. So in my mind’s eye, because it was all I could think of, I offered up the antique diamond engagement ring I’d found in the Cirque du Soleil parking lot. I felt very good about myself, filled with generosity and hope.

But when I checked in on the ring proper, which I’d stashed away for safekeeping — there it wasn’t. Well, the ring was in its place, but the diamond was gone. It had disappeared. I had no idea what happened to it.

“Did that imaginary guide-type helper actually take the diamond?” I wondered aloud. Was that possible?

“No,” James scoffed, laughing, pulling me onto his lap. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Hey, you are messing with my magic,” I said, a bit stung, and moved away from him.

It’s what I wanted to believe, anyway. Because since then, I find jewelry, nearly everywhere I go.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Brenton Geach / Gallo Images / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.

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Letter to a Dog Walking Service

Illustration by Wenting Li

Diane Mehta | Longreads | February 2018 | 21 minutes (5,195 words)

Dear REDACTED,

I’m writing to inform you that you have a terrible way with people. We hired you because you offered predictability in a hectic world. The point is that each day you have sent a different person to walk our dog. We’ve been polite about it. But it stops now. Imagine if every day you came home to a different husband or there was a weird substitute for your onion bagel. But I like variety, you might say. Well, imagine that your substitute for the onion bagel was a kishka and you were a vegetarian, or that the different husband you came home to every night smelled like a kishka, and you were a vegetarian. Consistency over kishkas is the point. You’re supposed to send a regular person on a regular walk on a regular schedule.

When I hired you, I told you about the migraines. Daily since March. I’m not sure how old you are, and whether you’ve had children, but a full-blown migraine is like childbirth in your head. Put it in dog terms, you say. Think of a ferocious, rabid dog inside you clawing to get out and you’re on all fours, crying, stuck with it, and you think there’s no kind of chew toy or meat treat in the world that can stop this.

A two-hour window for dog walking is just the edge of what I can handle. What happens if she is late? Then I will get angry. One of my migraine triggers is waiting. I have learned to avoid situations in which I am waiting, and now here I am stuck waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Kishka of whatever aptitude or variety to arrive. This is not okay for me. Neither is it okay for my new dog.
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Alan Watts and the Eternal Present

Alan Watts
Alan Watts. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)

In 1950, both the world and Alan Watts were at a pivotal point. Russia had recently detonated its first atomic weapon, ushering in an age of global anxiety.

By the spring, Watts himself was undergoing a jarring transformation: his first wife had their marriage annulled because of an affair, and he resigned his position as an Episcopalian minister. Watts left the church, he later remembered, “not because it doesn’t practice what it preaches, but because it preaches.” Read more…

Living That Early Bird Life, But Differently

AP Photo/The Winchester Star, Jeff Taylor

When Jaya Saxena and her husband visited his grandparents in their Florida retirement community, they found what the author calls “the early bird life.” Early bed time, inexpensive meals, look-alike housing, this was a land where predictability isn’t a dreary monotony to avoid. It’s a sign of success. For Eater, Saxena describes how they experienced this Florida by embracing its comforting routine, rest and the early bird special, the lifestyle’s affordable, predictable, culinary centerpiece. Surprisingly, they found a meal in decline. Once beloved by retirees, aging Boomers don’t take the same interest in this meal, or need to save money, or share previous generations’ visions of retirement, and their disinterest threatens this culinary icon. As diners pass away, will their early bird special go with them?

Whether rich, poor, or merely one of the declining middle class, though, few of the new Olds want to embrace their age. “Your generation is definitely not headed for bingo night,” the actor Dennis Hopper says in an Ameriprise ad about retirement investment for boomers, backed by a soundtrack of “Gimme Some Lovin.’” For boomers, a retirement of shuffling between kitchenless apartments and the local soup counter is hell, and you’re not going to drag them there yet. “The baby boomers who are coming of age these days, in part they’re healthier for longer into their lives, view old age in very different terms,” Haley said. “And don’t want to be seen as the men with the hiked-up pants and rolled-up cuffs, and the little old lady on a cane.”

Rosie Ross, a snowbird — though she prefers the term “sunbird” — who spends summers in upstate New York and winters in South Florida with her husband Bernard, told me that “the notion of early bird specials is something we attribute to older seniors, the same ones who sneak leftover rolls and sugar packets in their purses.” Though Bernard’s mother lives in North Miami, the Rosses didn’t want to live like she does. “We settled on a very cool active-adult community in the very cool city of Delray Beach,” Rosie said. The Rosses dine out multiple times a week, eat everything from Japanese to vegan, prefer to eat around 7 p.m., and “do not eat out based on early bird specials at all.” I could feel the pride emanating from her email.

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His Life’s Set Prize: The Story of Polar Explorer Henry Worsley

Unreleased picture date is Friday April 18, 2008. Left to right. Shipping lawyer Henry Adams, City worker Will Gow and Team Leader, Henry Worsley, 47, during a training session at Constable Point, Greenland. (Photo by Joel Ryan - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

At The New Yorker, David Grann tells the story of Henry Worsley, a British military man and “apostle” of polar adventurer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley earned fame by retracing Shackleton’s failed expedition to reach the South Pole. He, along with two teammates reached their destination on January 9th, 2009. A case study in the art of story pacing, this piece is a testament to the triumphs and perils of human ambition and endurance.

After Frank Worsley and other members of the expedition buried Shackleton, at a cemetery on the island, they found stones and built a cairn to mark the grave.

More than eighty years later, Henry Worsley, carrying a rucksack and a sleeping bag, pried open the cemetery gate and went inside. It was twilight, and he could just make out the cairn and a granite tombstone, which was engraved with a paraphrase of a line by Robert Browning: “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” Worsley put his sleeping bag on the ground and climbed inside it, facing the block of granite. “Reaching out to touch it I considered for a moment just how significant a moment in my life this was,” he later wrote, adding, “I was about to spend the night . . . beside the grave of my hero since childhood.”

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A Teen and a Toy Gun

(Illustration by Nicole Rifkin)

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)

I.

The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.

Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.

In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.

If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.

A few hours later, it did.

It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes  snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.

They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.

When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.

Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.

She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.

She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Journalist Masha Gessen
Journalist Masha Gessen. (Photo by Jim Spellman/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Masha Gessen, Molly Osberg, T. S. Mendola, Alexander Chee, and George Murray.

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The Money His Father Left Behind, and the Life it Would Start

Alexander Chee with his father in 1968. (Alexander Chee / BuzzFeed)

When Alexander Chee’s father died at the age of 43 he didn’t leave a will. Instead, his estate was divided evenly among his wife and three children. When he turned 18, Chee was bequeathed a trust, and the first thing he bought was something he thought his father would want for him — a black Alfa Romeo.

In an essay for BuzzFeed adapted from his forthcoming collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Chee recounts the nine years he spent spending the inheritance, often prudently — paying for college, grad school, and preparing for a life of the mind — and sometimes impetuously, like the purchase of the fast car his father would have loved.

For those nine years, I felt both invulnerable and doomed, under the protection of a spell that I knew to be dwindling in power. The Alfa broke down finally while I was driving from Iowa to New York City. I left it where it stopped, in Poughkeepsie, on the street in front of a friend’s apartment. That summer, newly released from graduate school, with no job and no prospects, I had no money to repair it or move it. Eventually the car, covered in unpaid tickets, was impounded and sold by the state to cover the towing and storage costs. My money gone, I surrendered to life without either the trust’s protections or the car. I know it was all stupid, and I was ashamed, and felt powerless in the face of the problem and ashamed of that powerlessness. But I was also tired of being mistaken for someone who was rich when I felt I had less than nothing.

I had believed I would feel lighter without the money, free of the awful feeling of having it but not having my father. And yet spending the last of it was not just like failing my father — it was like losing him again.

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