Another silence. “Dr. Griffith,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m the broker for you.”
Another heart rip. “Why not?” I asked, even as I didn’t want to ask, because I didn’t want to hear the answer. Say it, I thought. I dare you to say it.
“With respect, Doctor,” he said, next, though there was no respect in his voice, “with respect—I think you have to be realistic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Doctor, forgive me,” he said, “but your granddaughter is—”
“My granddaughter is what?” I snapped, and there was another silence.
He paused. I could see him recognizing how angry I was; I could see him realizing I wanted to have a reason to fight with him; I could see him preparing to be careful.
“Special,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “She is special, she is very special, and she will need a husband who understands how special she is.”
I must have sounded as livid as I was, because his voice, until then devoid of compassion, changed somewhat. “I want to show you something,” he said, and tugged a thin envelope from the bottom of a stack on his desk. “Here are the matches I found for your granddaughter,” he said.
I opened it. Inside were three cards, of the sort that you have to give to a broker. Stiff pieces of paper, about seven inches square, with the applicant’s photo on one side and their data on the other.
I looked at them. All of them were sterile, of course, the red “S” debossed across their foreheads. The first man was in his fifties, thrice widowed, and the old illogical part of me—the part that remembered those Gothic television shows about men murdering their wives, disposing of their bodies, and eluding the law for decades—recoiled, and I turned his card facedown, rejecting him before I could read the rest of his data, which probably revealed that his wives had all died of the illness, not by his hand （and yet what kind of bad luck was that, to have three wives die, but a bad luck that bordered on criminality?）。 The second was a man in, I guessed, his late twenties, but with an expression so furious—his mouth a mean seam, his eyes astonished and bulging—that I had a vision, again from those old television shows I still sometimes watch late at night in the office, of him hitting Charlie, of him hurting her, as if I could read his potential for violence in his face. The third was a man in his early thirties, with a plain, placid face, but when I studied his information, I saw that he had been listed as “MI”： mentally incompetent. This is a broad designation, one that comprises all kinds of deficiencies of the sort that had once been known as mental disease, but also mental disability. Charlie does not have this designation. I had been willing to ask you to send money to bribe anyone I had to in order to prevent this, but I hadn’t needed to in the end—she had passed their tests; she had saved herself.
“What are these?” I asked, my voice shrill in the quiet.
“These are the three applicants I could find who would consider your granddaughter,” he said.
“Why were you looking for applicants before you even met her?” I asked, and as I did, I realized that he had determined who Charlie was from her files well before he had met her, probably well before he had even met me. Meeting her hadn’t changed his mind—it had confirmed the idea of her he’d already had.
“I think you should try someone else,” he repeated, and handed me another piece of paper, on which was typed three other brokers’ names, and I understood that he had known from even before this meeting that he wasn’t going to help me. “These people will have candidates that are more…in keeping with your needs.”
Thank god he didn’t smile, or I’d’ve done something stupid and male and animal: swung at him, spit at him, swept everything off his desk—the kind of things someone on one of those old television shows would have done. But now there was no one to perform for, no camera but the tiny blinking one I knew was secreted in the ceiling panels somewhere, dispassionately recording the scene below: two men, one elderly, one middle-aged, handing pieces of paper to each other.
I recomposed my face and left with Charlie. I held her as close to me as she’d allow. I told her I’d find someone for her, although something inside me was crumbling: What if no one wanted my little cat? Surely someone would see how dear she is, how much she’s loved, how brave she is? She survived, and yet she is being punished for surviving. She wasn’t like those applicants—leftovers, dregs, the unwanted. I thought this even as I also understood that to someone, they too weren’t leftovers or unwanted, even—the heart ripping out again—that their someones might be looking at Charlie’s card and thinking, “This is what they expect him to settle for? Surely there’s someone better. Surely there’s someone more.”
What world is this? What world has she lived for? Tell me it’ll be okay, Peter. Tell me and I’ll believe you, this one last time.
Love, Charles
Oh, dear Peter, March 21, 2087
How I wish we could speak on the phone. I wish that often, but I wish it desperately tonight, so much so that before I sat down to write you, I spent the past half hour talking aloud to you, whispering under my breath so I wouldn’t wake Charlie, asleep in the other room.
I haven’t written about Charlie’s marriage prospects as much as I might have because I wanted to wait until I had something happier to say. But about a month ago, I found a new broker, Timothy, who was known to specialize in what a colleague of mine called “unusual cases.” He had used Timothy to find someone for his son after his son was declared MI. It had taken almost four years, but Timothy had found him a match.
With each broker I’d met, I had tried to act more confident than I’d felt. I’d admit I’d seen a few of their colleagues, but never specified just how many. Depending on the person, I would try to make Charlie sound choosy, mysterious, brilliant, aloof. But every relationship would end the same way, sometimes even before I had a chance to bring Charlie in to meet them; the same kinds of candidates would be presented to me, sometimes candidates I’d seen before. That pale and placid young man marked MI had been shown to me three times since I first was given his card, and each time I saw his face, I felt a mix of sorrow and relief: sorrow that he too was still unmatched; relief that it wasn’t just Charlie. I thought of her card, now foxed on the edges, being shown and reshown, of clients or their parents flicking it to the side. “Not her,” I imagined them saying, “we’ve seen her before.” And then, at night, to one another, “That poor girl, still on the market. At least our son isn’t that desperate.”
But this time, I was honest. I detailed exactly which brokers I’d seen. I told him about all the candidates I’d been presented or met with, on whom I’d taken notes. I was as honest as I could bear to be without crying or being disloyal to Charlie. And when Timothy said, “But beauty isn’t everything. Is she charming?” I waited until I was sure I could control my voice before I said she wasn’t.
At our second meeting, I was given five cards, none of which I’d seen before. Something unsettled me about each of the first four. But then there was the final card. He was a young man, only two years older than Charlie, with large dark eyes and a strong nose, looking straight into the camera. There was something inarguable about him—his handsomeness, for one, but also his steadiness, as if someone had tried to convince him to be ashamed of himself and he had chosen not to be. Over his picture were two stamps: one that declared him sterile, the other that declared him an enemy relation.