Muffy Potter had tried everything - singles bars, the Whitney, the National Gallery, the Vassar Club, and even box seats at Nationals Stadium - with no luck. She never thought that she would have to put in overtime for finding a husband - the best schools, college, the right milieu, and enough gifted genes to make her a passable find for any man.
Yet there she was dabbling in the personals of the New York Review of Books, 'SWF seeks lover of Great Falls, Bach, and afternoon tea', and checking out online dating sites. How unexpected, how disgraceful, how sick! A woman of her pedigree, talents and not inconsiderable beauty scrounging around the personals for a 'likeminded lover of Nature and Bayonne, New Jersey'.
A friend at work suggested a popular and apparently successful online mating service - a simple matter of filling out a detailed questionnaire and waiting for a vetted list of compatible men. The temptation to overdo it, warned Muffy’s friend, is strong; so don't give in to vanity. Those on the other side of the fence will be doing the same thing and you will end up with some deformed caricature of your dreams.
So Muffy signed up, paid the fee, and set to work. There were two parts to the questionnaire - what she wanted in a man, and how she would describe herself. She tackled the 'him' part first, but her entries were replays of the personals in the New York Review - 'someone to share books, firelight, and poetry' and the like, when what she really wanted was a rutting ram. How to express this without attracting unwanted attention? She didn't want to come off like some tart, a hooker on a street corner on the Rue St. Denis.
This was more like her senior essay, one with frankness, sincerity, and innuendo; and she worked at it just as hard she did at Vassar. Yet, it still came out stilted, fabricated, and far from the truth.
Her side of the coin - 'Describe yourself honestly, correctly, and exactly' the instructions indicated - but how was one to assemble all the subjective, intuitive, sensitive parts of one's character without some embroidery? Isn't that what she did at the bars on the Upper East Side? Or how she adjusted her persona to accommodate the more rarified environment of Soho?
She was creative in spirit, but had never gotten beyond stick figures in reality; intelligent but well behind the curve when it came to differential calculus and organic chemistry; athletic but somehow just shy of the goal. What she was, was an interesting person that had been in Europe, could converse about Styron, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy with some fluency, and....goddamn it, something real, palpable and within reach.
She finally completed the questionnaire - the man she was looking for might not be Adonis but close, a man of scruples but fun, one of sexual maturity but adolescent desire, a man of intelligence and breeding...She erased it all. She had fallen into the smarmy trap of sexual idealism, and would not tolerate it for an instant more.
But looking at the now erased, scrubbed, and empty questionnaire, she was stuck. She knew exactly what she wanted, but couldn't quite put it into words.
There was the 'Help' option on the site. AI would suggest, picture, and describe men she might, according to her demographic data, like. Not real men, of course, but generated images and confected characterizations. The avatars were given names - Bob, Billy, Lance, Pedro and the like; and the seeker was to pick and choose. The computer would do the rest, winnowing, vetting, searching, and suggesting on its own. The 'reactive mode 'rather than the 'proactive' one.
Trial and error, entries and erasures, assisted searches, end-arounds, fictions, hard facts, and closure. Muffy could only hope for the best. The service provided her with a short list of eligible men, asked her to review their annotated CVs and photo albums, to pick the most likely and contact them through the company's secure server.
It was an out-of-body experience, as Muffy described it. The man sitting across the table from her was not there by circumstance - two needy souls at the Mayflower bar just before closing - but some electronically facilitated, virtual assignment. Bruce - the guy sipping his pina colada across from her -was not real, nor imagined, but generated.
She went through three of these programmed meetings, all pleasant enough, respectful, dutiful, and serious. The men were well dressed and groomed, tapered properly, and reasonable enough, but the thought of any one of them on top of her was disgusting. It wasn't so much the guys, all decent enough, but just the idea of some virtual stranger in an intimate, compromising position was disgusting.
'You weren't honest', Muffy's friend said, 'try again and this time go deep'; but once again without sounding like a tart, a Belle de Jour, a Happy Hooker, a loose woman, how could she find the Lawrentian partner she was looking for.
Connie Chatterley left her crippled husband in a wheelchair looking at the smoldering embers of the fire, while she had her way with Mellors, the gamekeeper and they came together in ecstatic union. Sexual complementarity, expressed in the moment of simultaneous orgasm is epiphanic and soul- releasing, wrote Lawrence.
How to put that in words, wondered Muffy? and Lawrence gave no clues as to finding that one, orgasmic partner; so she soldiered on, increasingly frustrated with the lame, weak Nellies, overbearing sods, and blowhards as ridiculous as Portia's suitors who came her way. How did one do it? How did one find a match from the overwhelmingly indecorous lot of ordinary men?
'Time out', she shouted to no one in her Dupont Circle walkup, and decided to let serendipity take its course. Perhaps her bullying intent was the problem. Let love come to her; but as the months passed with no dice, she was tempted to re-up, to give it a go once again, to take hold of the reins.
She looked at the calendar. She wasn't getting any younger and her biological clock was ticking. She wanted to be taken, to be impregnated, to give birth and to be fulfilled as a woman, and her she was watering her petunias alone on a Saturday night.
It would be nice to report that Mr. Right appeared thereafter - a knight in shining armor, a Mellors, the man of her dreams, her ying-yang Tantric complement - but some women are destined for spinsterhood, old maids, and aunties
It was surprising to many that Muffy Potter ended up in this leaky lifeboat - so attractive, appealing, and available was she - but the gods of determinism have some say in the matter. Who knows why she was so picky - an unreliable father? A snipped, curt, and sexually diffident mother? Father Brophy and his apocalyptic warnings? Mrs. Linder, the dancing teacher who showed her perhaps too much interest?
Who's to say, and what does it matter?
It would be nice to say - a fitting end to the story - that Muffy Potter found Mr. Right, but the cards had been dealt long before she knew what was what. Given the configuration of ancestry, parentage, environment and the quirky genes of Aunt Melissa and Great Uncle Hiram among others, she had no say in whether the matter, so despite her desire, ambition, and good intention, she ended up a crotchety, testy old maid.
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