Marfa Potter Goes Shredding To Meet A Guy - Whatever It Takes, A Marriage Made In A Parking Lot

Getting to Parking Lot 8 of abandoned RFK Stadium in Southeast Washington was not easy, especially for Marfa Potter, a young woman who had grown up in a secure, privileged family, gone to the best schools, and now lived in Georgetown, one of Washington's most exclusive residential neighborhoods. 

The trip required GPS and because a wrong turn could take her deep into the heart of the inner city, she doubled and tripled up - Garmin and a highly recommended Space X geo-satellite app.  Shades of the Tom Wolfe book about a white couple who get off the wrong exit; or Cousin Benny's Milwaukee wedding where Hyman Frank took a wrong turn and stopped for directions at a Seven Eleven, deep int the nastiest city ghetto. 

 

'They don't like no white folks up in here', a black cop who  happened to stop for donuts and coffee advised, but Hyman, deeply committed to civil rights and the black man's righteous scaling of the social heights, kept on taking wrong turns, stopping for directions and by another stroke of good luck - no dope should have been so lucky -  made it back to the hotel 

In any case Marfa decided to make the trip to Anacostia and RFK.  Her lawyers and accountants handled all the heavy lifting when it came to taxes, investments, and trust management, and just about everything these days was online, but she managed to stuff a few boxes full of scrap paper and incidental memos to justify a trip to the shredding center, and at the appointed hour, she headed off. 

Why, you might ask, would she even bother with such a penitential trip to the ghetto?  It was certainly not for privacy and financial security, nor to clear the basement of clutter.  It was to meet a man. 

As unseemly for a woman of her pedigree as it might seem, it was her last hurrah before resigning herself to spinsterhood.  She had cruised the National Gallery, the Philipps, and the Corcoran; had canvassed the intermission crowd at the Kennedy Center assembled for Swan Lake; had joined runners clubs, skiers events, and even joined the Potomac Rowing Club - all in the hopes of meeting a man. 

When she looked in the mirror that Thursday May morning about to undertake the journey to RFK, she didn't like what she saw.  Despite her relatively young age - forty wasn't that old - she was getting saggy, a bit jowly, lined, and a bit pasty looking. Nips and tucks were so bourgeois, and all-day luxuriant spa treatments were simply too Hollywood, so the face looking back at her from the mirror was hers to keep for better or worse. 

'The inner woman', she kept telling herself as the days and months went by without a single serious suitor; but most men were never bothered with looking beyond T&A.  Her inner rooms were to be forever closed if the key were to be in their hands. 

Last week it was the Gardner lecture on T.S. Eliot, the week before a DAR tour of Winterthur, the week before that owling on the C&O Canal, but nothing came of it. A wash, a sexual no-show, an idle venture, a total waste of time. 

The problem was this: the sexual dynamics of the day being what they were and not much evolved from a thousand years before - men, as ugly as sin, because of wealth, family, and professional promise could get the girl while women had to scrap for purchase - were still in play.  

Ever since the catty, claws out, bitchy days of high school when women were their own enemies, women had to marshal and assemble resources men had no idea about and no time for. 

The men on these tours, looking interested at Delacroix, or listening intently to talks on the spotted owl and snail darter were leftovers.  Men who despite the fact could have any woman they wanted if the price were right, were on the mating trail, pretending sexual agency when they had none at all. Pitiful. 

So why Marfa even bothered to make it down to RFK for the twice a year shredding jamboree was surprising even to her; but a woman who feels at the end of her rope, has to cling to it and try to pull herself up no matter how tenuous the haul. 

According to her friends who had ventured across the Anacostia to Indian Country and the shredding bonanza at RFK, it was a great opportunity to meet men.  The hundreds of Washingtonians who lined up for shredding were not from the ghetto. 

The Washington inner city was off payroll. None there had any investments to speak of, were not registered on the tax rolls, and lived day-to-day.  Their basements were cluttered with dilapidated baby carriages, Chevy manifolds, and empty malt liquor cases - not IRS forms, trust fund records, or business contracts. 

So the drivers of the Lexus, Mercedes, Volvo, and Infiniti SUVs snaking around the pilons to the shredding trucks were all of a higher order, and many of them marriageable. 

This time DC's classic inefficiency, disorder, and completely chaotic management was a boon for Marfa, for while she was standing around waiting for her files to be shredded, she met interesting men. These were not the pretentious intellectual wannabees at the Corcoran but working professionals who were their own men, confident, secure, and always on the lookout. 

At first glance - this chaotic, undisciplined, poorly-organized and -managed affair - would not seem to be the ideal meeting place for prospective sexual partners, but to assume so one would be guilty of social myopia and preconceived notions.  Amidst the clutter, mayhem and spilled cartons of paper were great guys, only waiting for the opportunity to meet women. 

And so it was, Serendipitus Victor!, that Marfa Potter met Lincoln Addison.  'Over a bin of trash', they both laughed over glass of Moet Chandon. 

'The ghetto has some advantages, after all', said Lincoln, happily alone with Marfa and planning their live together, 'Who would have thought that the slums and shredding would have given us this?'