A Happy Catastrophe

I gasp and blink in surprise as it slowly occurs to me that the entire front of my body is freezing cold, soaking wet now with two kinds of wine.

“OH MY HELL WHAT JUST HAPPENED,” says the guy.

“White wine takes away red wine,” says his mother. “Believe me. She’ll thank me later.”

“Mom!” he says. “You can’t go pouring wine on a stranger! How is it that you don’t know this?” He turns to me. “I am so sorry. Really! Please, Mom, sit down. You’re making things worse.” He’s grabbing for even more napkins. Soon he’ll be going from table to table taking them out of people’s laps, I’m afraid.

“Oh, stop it, Graham. This will take the stain out,” she says, her eyes huge and insistent and maybe just a tad insane. “White takes out red. Everybody knows this.”

He says to me in a low voice, “You might want to run to the restroom before she starts ordering whole pitchers of pinot grigio to drown you in.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” she says, laughing. “This son of mine! He always makes me out to be a lunatic, when he’s the one who can’t figure out how to be on time for dinner when he knows I have a plane to catch. Thanks to him, I can’t even finish my glass of wine because my Uber’s coming for me. Anyway, honey, your skirt already looks better.”

“I’ll go to the ladies’ room and get the rest out,” I tell her, ducking in case she’s going to now start dousing me with other liquids she finds around the restaurant. “But thank you.”

“No, no!” wails Graham. “Don’t thank her. We don’t want to encourage this.”

“Why shouldn’t she thank me?” she says. “I did her a favor. And now kiss your old mother good-bye, you rapscallion, because I’ve got to go.”

She holds his face between her two hands and kisses him, the loud, smacking kind of kisses, and then she turns to me. “Are you married, by any chance? Because this delinquent of mine is very available. Unfathomable, I know, but true.”

I decide I like these two, just as Micah, the waiter, glides over with a fresh white tablecloth and some setups and a new glass of wine for me.

“When Patrick gets here,” I say to him, “would you please tell him I’m in the restroom?”

“Well, are you married?” the mother says.

“She’s married to Patrick,” says Micah, and I can’t resist correcting him. Patrick and I are not exactly married, I explain, but we are committed, living together, here forever, all that.

“It’s never forever until you get the ring,” warns the mom, and Graham rolls his eyes and picks up a huge suitcase she’d stored under the table, and begins ushering her out, his hand at the small of her back. She’s waving to all of us like a beauty queen on a parade float—and all I can think as I hurry to the restroom is that I hope he comes back.

Because something momentous has just happened. There are sparkles forming in the air all around that guy, and I know what that means: he’s about to fall in love with somebody, and the reason I’m here is because the universe needs me to help things along.

Sure enough, as soon as I get to scrubbing my skirt in the ladies’ room, a woman comes out of one of the stalls, and bingo! Right away I know she’s the one. The air shimmers around her, exactly the way it did around him.

It happens like this with matchmaking sometimes. I’ve been doing this gig for more than four years now, and there are times when I’ll be on the subway or walking down the street, and I see two people who aren’t even looking in each other’s direction, and suddenly I know I have to engineer them into each other’s path. I’ve jumped out of coffee shop lines, redirected cab drivers, and embarrassed myself by racing across parks, leaping over small dogs and picnic blankets—all so I could accost strangers who were in danger of walking away and missing out on love.

And it works. That’s the most amazing thing: the shimmers don’t lie.

But this time! Oh my. This woman is tall and red-haired and, despite the sparkles twinkling around her, is sort of theatrically sad. I watch as she leans toward the mirror and sighs, like her face might be a disappointing used car she’s considering buying. I keep stopping my skirt-scrubbing to see what she’s deciding about herself. Is she going to buy this face or not?

“Wow,” I say. “Would you look at my skirt! Can you believe this? I spilled red wine all over myself. How bad does it look? Is it really terrible?”

She drags her eyes over to me. “It looks fine to me,” she says. Her voice sounds close to tears, which is a little bit of a setback for my plan for her. In the past, I’ve had to bring weeping people to meet the person they’re going to fall in love with, but I’m not going to lie: it’s a harder path.

“Funny thing,” I say. “I’m the one who spilled the red wine, but then a woman sitting at the next table stood up and threw her glass of white wine on the stain! Just tossed a whole glass on me, because she claimed that everybody knows white wine takes out red wine stains.”

“Yeah, I think everybody might be a little crazy these days, don’t you?” she says sadly. “I’ve just been stood up by a guy who sent me thirty text messages telling me I’m the one for him, and then we make a date, and now he texted me that he changed his mind.”

“What a jerk,” I say.

“I even shaved my legs for this dude,” she says, “and now he’s texting me he’s not coming?”

“Listen to me,” I say, all in a rush. “It’s awful, especially the leg-shaving part. And the texting part. Thirty texts is too many, a red flag, actually. But I have to tell you something. There’s a man out there in the restaurant right now, and I think he is going to be the love of your life. No, I know he is.”

She blanches. As anyone would.

“I think you should consider going out there and meeting him,” I say. “Your call, of course, but it might be something you’ll look back on and be happy about.”

She stares at me for a minute like it’s now confirmed that I’m part of the conspiracy of crazies, and then she turns on the water and starts washing her hands. “How am I supposed to believe that you know who I’m looking for when you don’t even know one thing about me?”

“I know. I’m just a woman in a public bathroom with wine all over her skirt. But don’t you believe that things can work out in mysterious ways? That everything is kind of just up to luck—like whether you get into a certain subway car where someone you need to meet is waiting, or whether you enter a shop and start talking to a stranger that you end up loving for the rest of your life?”

“That has not happened to me,” she says with a bitter laugh.

“It’s happening to you tonight,” I say. “Just go out there. He’s a very nice man in a very tasteful fedora with a little feather on it—I was sitting next to him. In fact, it was his mother who threw the white wine on my skirt, but now she’s gone and he’s eating all by himself.”

“A fedora with a feather?” she says and laughs again.

“Don’t be like that. The feather is entirely removable,” I say sternly. “And anyway, I’m aware that it sounds crazy, but I’m a matchmaker. I know things by intuition. I read energy. You know how it is that you can feel when people are looking at you across a room or something? Well, I can feel when people match up.”