Looking for Mister Right Stuff

Our dauntless correspondent faces her traumatic memories of Dartmouth romance head-on, by signing up with an elite-school dating service.

A little troupe of us prospectives had snuck into one of the houses, and there he was, busy winning a dice game with his buddies. Upon learning I was a pre-freshman, he said he'd give me a personal tour of the campus, so out we walked to the middle of the Green. Beneath a full moon he lifted me up in the air, whirled me around, gave my thermal fleeced corpus a hug, and stuck his tongue in my mouth. I've finally had my first kiss, I thought. And Dartmouth became my first choice.

When I arrived several months later, though, I found myselfinvolved in the humanities rather than the romance. As I wandered from class to class, activity to activity, there were no alarming distractions beyond my bad Economics 1 grades to make my heart go pitter-pat. I had friends, but no boyfriends. I went to parties with my freshman-year roommate, who was a popular power-extrovert. Her typical introduction went something like this: "Meet Jane, she's a virgin. Hey guys, listen up! I said she's a virgin." Fraternal eyes would turn to me shocked, disbelieving. I'd excuse myself and say I was heading to the restroom and disappear, hoping they d forget me.

After a few introductions of that nature, I sought more alternative social alternatives. Leaving a party one October night, I ran into a guy from my hometown who had never been too friendly to me back in Dixie. But oddly enough, he invited me to a party in his dorm. When we got there no party was in progress, and when I overheard him whispering with his hallmate about whether or not they could get me naked and perform various acts, I excused myself for that ever-handy restroom and narrowly escaped an assault attempt on my person by walking home, sockfooted, to the River dorms from the Choates. I found it hard to believe that this was my social life among the best and the brightest in the nation come and get the virgin and I dare you to get her naked but that's what it was.

Before giving up altogether, I spent some time with a jaunty Jagerm eister-swilling transfer from my yoga-for-gym-credit class But when he returned my hall-slip in an interdepartmental mail envelope, I began to consider throwing in the towel.

Nonetheless, during my sophomore summer I again looked for romantic distraction. I developed a crush on a Puckish guy who dressed up as Jesus for extra credit in a course on Medieval passion plays. He ended up writing ill tidings of me in a secret fraternity newsletter that I excavated from a trash can with some girl friends. "You are such a loser!' I shouted into a full-moonlit night as he retreated back into the shadows of Webster Avenue. Departing the Green, I sensed that some kind of circle had completed itself and it was truly time to give up on college dating. I became cranky and fork-tongued, and a friend abroad in Pans sent me a whip as a present. Thus armed, my hard little heart throbbed along in its paranoid quarters for two more years until I could move to New York City, where no matter how out of place you feel, there's always someone weirder around the next corner to make you fit back in.

In my three years of Manhattan living, I've been the subject of all the superficial attention anyone could ever desire. I actually have enjoyed many fine relations, but none of them blossomed into what one could call a lasting relationship. Whining over fat-free pasta with a friend in similar straits, we concluded that, for experimental purposes if for no other reason, one of us had to call what she referred to as "The Ivy League Dating Service." My friend handed me an advertisement that said, Date Someone in Your Own League." It described a business called "The Right Stuff."

What was my league? 20,000 under the sea? My thoughts turned to the stuff of paranoias past: What if the men wrote about me in corporate newsletters? What if they returned my lingerie Federal Express? What if they expected me to be rich or a genius or a power athlete?

Then an opportunity occurred to me: Could I borrow a few members of the Right Stuffs knightly sex and describe them in. an article? And so I secured an assignment with this magazine. After all, a gal has to earn her bread and butter.

When I called the Right Stuff I heard a friendly answermgmachine message from the business's co-founder, Dawne Touchings: "Thank you for calling The Right Stuff. We are an introduction network for the graduates and faculty of the Ivy, Seven Sisters, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, and the other excellent schools mentioned in our ads." I left my name, and revealed my intentions, and in a few weeks there came a phone call from Dawne, a packet of sign-up materials, and a 28-page database of highly educated men, a prime sampling of the 1,500 folks in the "Right Stuff' stable. Reading through the list I found a state senator, a retired vintner. There were writers and playwrights and actors. I found a Jungian spiritual seeker, an Anglophile linguist; there were pilots and marathon finishers and furniture builders, men who ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and a snorkeler who sang in a choral group. One fellow said he was a "good-looking Jewish guy (at least my mother thinks so)." There were many hypnotherapists, such as the "financially secure dentist and hypnotherapist" and the "divorced, rocket scientist, hypnotherapist, massage therapist, cyclist, blader, Nordic skier." Most were in their mid-thirties. Some had grandkids.

"We named it The Right Stuff because, like the characters from that movie, we feel that the people who will use the service are all involved in the pursuit of excellence," Dawne, a 30-something Cornell M.B.A. who talks softly and carries a big job title, told me between bites of vegetarian chili at a cafe near Grand Central. In between an analysis of Canadian literature Dawne is a native Canadian we were discussing the trials and travails of being smart women in the world today and the difficulty of having time for a social life.

Dawne seemed personally invested in my achieving success on the dating front, and, as one of my dates later told me, her business was indeed a "labor of love." From a normal customer, the business only makes $35 from annual fees and $3 for each date request. Dawne and I decided that if I was to write about my dates, then the fair thing to do would be for me to pick two of them and to let The Right Stuff pick two for me. All the men would go out with me knowing they were subject to the microscope of Dartmouth readers—and one rather neurotic young woman.

On a Monday shortly after I met Dawne I had a date with my first Right Stuff subject, one of my choices, a graduate of two prominent North Carolina schools who worked tor a well-known book publisher. I walked down Madison Avenue from my office to Chelsea, that neighborhood above the Meatpacking District and below Hell's Kitchen and a little northwest of NYU. It was the first real spring day. Down south the dogwoods were blooming. In New York, somewhere in Central Park a tourist was being mugged. And inside the Flatiron, leaning against the lobby wall like a model, Bachelor #1 was awaiting my arrival and reading a novel. Of the four gentlemen I would meet in the ten-day period, he appeared to be the most sensitive. His description said he was a "book editor and poet" and when I first called his home phone number to arrange a rendezvous there was an austere message about the courtesy of not hanging up, of leaving a message. I hung up. Then I called again and left a message. Eventually we made plans to meet at his workplace.

I approached the building from the wrong side, and tugged on a glass door that would not budge. In the lobby I saw a slim guy with a blue blazer over one arm and a book in the other. He peered intensely at the text was it poetry? Rilke? A little Rita Dove? I waved but he did not see me, so I walked to the other side, feeling voyeuristic.

We introduced ourselves and wandered to a Chelsea trattoria just a few blocks away. It was early for a meal, but we proceeded anyway. "So you're a poet? I said, and he confirmed that his description of himself was the real thing. "Well, you look like one!" Why did I say that? It was true, though; he was slender and quiet, slightly nervous and intense, whether from the fact of the blind date or struggle over life's Big Questions I would never know. His shirt was very white. I found out he was a Scorpio.

Somehow we began talking about books. We discussed the merits of Southern humorist Florence King, the fine author of classics such as WASP! Where is Thy Sting?, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, Reflections in aJaundiced Eye, and others. The crusty and brilliant writer covered it all, from debutante balls to lounge music to flying diaphragms. We talked about poetry, then moved onto God. The poet was from New Jersey, and raised Protestant. He liked to visit with his relatives sometimes on a lake. He said he had become somewhat atheistic.

I was from Virginia, and raised mostly Presbyterian, and liked to visit with my relatives via long-distance phone. I said I didn t know what I had become, but that I thought of the Bible as a great literary work and all the different religions who used it as schools of literary critics.

He said he liked that idea.

I said after two glasses of wine that maybe I was having a lit tie too much fun and that in reality most of my spiritual life was culled from occasional Tarot readings. On all of the dates, in fact, I found that my hermithood of recent months had led me to have a whole lot of fun on a glass of wine or a terrible movie. And I found that everyone wanted to talk about religion, which didn't surprise me. When you're unattached and have friends dropping the matrimony boom all around you and you live in the Babel of Gotham, the setting for movies like Single White Female and Fatal Attraction, it's easy to decide you need help from something grand, like God or a good psychologist.

At the end of my meal with the poet we said we'd keep in touch and do something literary sometime. We exchanged those little European cheek-kisses and went our separate ways. I never found out what book he had been reading and I wasn't sure it I should have let him pay. I didn't know if he d had a good time or not, but I do think it was a fine thing to meet another Florence King fan. Maybe he was reading one of her books.

A month or two after our date, I found myself ambling through a bookstore in Virginia, poking through regional literary magazines. The first one I opened, Shenandoah, included two poems written by my date so I bought the journal as a memento. The poems were about fish and a scenic overlook, and of course much more. I spoke to the poet again once or twice, but since I now had the tough job of discussing him for a Right Stuff audience, I didn't think we should keep up, for the time being. I didn't tell him I had read his work, since he seemed sensitive and I didn't want him to think I was a nut.

My next date—a workday lunch was with a 29-year old TV writer from Yale. He was very tall and very thin and lactose intolerant, but with fair hair and a sensitive face and innocent round eyes. He said he'd tried a hand at journalism on the West Coast after college, then returned to his native Manhattan, where he redirected his efforts toward more lucrative writing, freelancing for magazines and doing TV scripts and some film-related activity. He asked me if I had any interest in writing for Seventeen or that kind of magazine. Sure, I said. Why the heck not? I mean, he said, there are lots of articles about how to kiss the right way and that kind of thing, a good way to get the foot in the door, though it can be a little silly. I didn't know if it was the backhanded kind of compliment a gal gets now and then why don't you write something flufiy? or if it was a sincere offering of a help- ing hand. Then again, what made him think I knew how to write about kissing?

Satisfied that I, too, was Right enough Stuff, the gent invited me to see a play at Lincoln Center. So, on St. Patrick's Day, we met for a coffee at an outdoor cafe along Broadway, although I would have preferred a nice stiff social lubricant in one of the area bars. I wore my theater outfit: a curvaceous black dress and Elvira lipstick. He had on jeans and a theater-tekkie jacket and a pocket of tickets to Hapgood, a Tom Stoppard whodunit about agents and double agents killing each other. We seated ourselves in the round Mitzi New house Theater, and the lights dimmed. I don't get to the theater too often, so I was grateful for the invitation.

On stage: two bathhouses, a man in a power suit shaving at a table front and center stage, men with briefcases walking on and offstage, going in and out of the bathhouses in some kind of order. On my right: Mr. Rightstuff from Yale, his fingers elongating to bony protrusions that seemed a million feet long like a Salvador vador Dali painting. He started by holding my hand. But he was a petting stroking type. It was sort of nice, but sort of not. Then, while Detective Hapgood was starting to sort out a murder with her agents, the hand went around my shoulder, and then, while Hapgood and the agents were discovering they couldn't trust one another, the long Salvador Dali fingers played about my neck like an accordion. He was an affection monster. I felt no violation, but no particular pleasure either. I wanted to see the play. I was thinking: what is he thinking? What does he think I am thinking? The otolaryngological exam continued straight through to the end of the performance.

Afterwards, he asked what I wanted to do.

"How about some dinner?" I said, fearing strangulation.

He said he needed to stop by his place and change, and so off we went.

His apartment was a high-ceilinged studio just off Columbus Avenue. On the floor near the front door I saw a pair of jumbo Brooks Brothers shoes, which got me thinking about that Mary McCarthy story, "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt." Was he wearing one? Near the fireplace was a collection of stokers and pokers that made me think: Jeffrey Dahmer. To the right of that, a portrait of a family patriarch, and in a corner a wide desk and a tax machine. My eyes were grazing over his collections of Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff when Mr. Rightstuff's great Gumby arms came wrapping around my ribs.

Oh my.

Like the woman on the train in McCarthy s story, I was un able to feign enthusiasm, but also unable to resist. Am I a vixen? I was not expecting such behavior. Y ears of southern prudence gave way to a precocious rebellion reminiscent of the free-love days before my time. I didn't even know his sign.

"I'm not sure that this is appropriate journalistic behavior," I said, not that this was such a journalistic enterprise anyway.

"So start editing here," he said.

I would do no such thing at any man's instruction. Start editing here, my foot.

For the rest of the evening I kept turning over the question: Will I put this scene in the story or not? Will I put this scene in the story or not? And when I stumbled out of his building to amble home along a West Side street, two men drinking tall boys on the steps of a brownstone began cat-calling.

"Oooh, baby, I sure do like your big red smile," said one.

I was still wearing the Elvira lipstick. It never comes off, really.

"Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm," said the other. "You know she's been getting it!"

I hailed a cab instantly. I had to get some beauty rest and change my look: the next night I was going on a date with a psychologist from a hip Midwestern college.

The Spanish restaurant was in the West Village on a narrow tree-lined street. The psychologist awaiting me therein had described himself as having a whitecollar mind and a blue-collar heart. He had scored high when my college roommates and I met in a diner to discuss my potential Right Stuff candidates. We separated them into dream boats and anti-dream boats. The extreme anti-dream boat, for me, happened to be a person who said he was an ex-military officer "transformed to I-Banking" who had run a marathon every year since he'd been my age. Next! But then there was White-and-Blue Collar...

"So," he had asked me on the phone. "Did you like Dart mouth?"

"You're a shrink, aren't you?"

"When I'm on duty."

He asked me about the article, and I told him what I could.

"You won't make fun of single people, will your he said.

"I don't plan to," I said. Not intentionally anyway. What's to be mocked, of course, is not what a single person does at large but how two single people act when they re together.

When I stepped inside the restaurant a slender man in a denim shirt stood up and approached me. "I'm looking for someone, I said, thinking he was the maitre d'. Only he was my date. So he was in a blue collar! I had on a green turtleneck sweater.

Blue Collar hoisted a big bottle of red wine up on the table, opened it, and took a hearty Hemingway whiff. I settled down a bit and liked this guy. He looked like Christopher Walken, but with a kindly grace that made me want to confide.

I was still a little tired from my prior evening's suspense and such, but as we began drinking the wine, a dry red to which my usual Mad Dog Meets Zinfandel could not compare, he became, wistful and I became slightly inebriated. We discussed writing, his New York childhood, and how we had come to do what we were doing for a living. He was a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who worked as a therapist with older patients, and he was also, when not pursuing his Ph.D., a writer. He said he wanted to chronicle some of his patients' lives one day in a nonfiction book or collection of essays. He had studied with Allan Gurganus and Stanley Elkin at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and had even applied to and been accepted to the program where I was hacking my way through the English language. He was sensitive, and I was too tired to be my obnoxious self, so we got along swimmingly.

Another conversation about religion arose. He was getting back in touch with his Jewish roots by attending a local synagogue. I was hawking astrology. (After I learned my dates' birthdays I did substantial research on them.) This fellow was a Scorpio with a Pisces moon, which, with a former Cancer mother, made for much escapism and creativity and potential abandonment complexes, a fine and sensitive blend in my book. He passed me the wine. As for ethnic and cultural roots, I was pulling mine up as fast as I could, reciting a blend of job changes, credit-card abuse, and writing workshops. We ate couscous and lamb dishes with prunes and skillet chorizos prepared in some Andalusian way, and he told me about his trip to Spam and an affair he had had. I told him, halfway through the bottle of red, an edited version about my evening prior. We went for Italian fruit desserts and coffee, and he rode uptown on my subway line and kissed me goodnight on the cheek.

On our second date we went to see Lite Last Seduction, a Looking for Mr. Goodbar in reverse about a woman who steals her husband's money, hides from the police in upstate New York while manipulating a sincere country accountant, then forces him to go to Manhattan, where she kills her husband with Mace and incriminates the country guy for manslaughter and rape on her way to her new penthouse. On our third date we went to see Annie Proulx reading from The Shipping News but couldn't get tickets so we had Kahlua drinks and went to Barnes & Noble.

Three weeks into my research, I came home one day to find messages from all of the fellows on my answering machine. The last red beeping light belonged to my final date, whom I had met by phone before he went away on his annual vacation to the West. This fellow also had an annual vacation, around Christmas time, to a warm tropical resort climate, and some other seasonally organized vacation. I wondered if his bookshelves were alphabetized, and whether or not he had any Virgo in his chart.

Dawne had chosen this 37-year-old corporate accountant for me, I think, in the interests of diversifying my client portfolio, spreading my psychological investment in The Right Stuff among a varied selection of gentleman commodities.

"Where were you?" he asked in the Monday night message. "I waited for an hour."

We were supposed to have a drink and dinner on Tuesday. Just like a man.

I called him back and we straightened things out over the phone and finally met on the appointed night at The Old Town Tavern, a former speakeasy with mahogany paneling and a punched-tin ceiling.

He was very gentlemanly and looked a bit like a domesticated version of Indiana Jones, with a smirky dimple and an attractive way of leaning back into the wooden booth. He attributed his looks to his Aryan-Italian roots, which he could trace back, he said, to three generations of a good family in Seattle.

I found that a little unsettling, that he would describe him- self as something of a genetic object. Apparently he thought I was man-shopping at Sotheby's. I'm fourth-generation Southern mutt, I told him, a U.K. blend of English, Scottish, and Irish.

We ordered burgers and fries and some beer, and while we awaited our supper I asked him what led to his joining the Right Stuff. He told me he'd been engaged to a woman for a while and then she said she wasn't ready and so they both broke it off, which seemed kind of sad to me. He told me he was interested in living in a diverse suburban community in Westchester, in having a family one day. He said he'd almost bought a house in Bronxville. a Westchester enclave that's about as demographically colorful as my pigment at the height of winter.

He told me he didn't like Yale that much, which, along with his model physique and seriousness, won him a point. Even it he was an Aries. He had on some kind of snappy old-time downtown suit with suspenders. He was probably wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt.

Over the fries and burgers we got to talking books. He was obsessed with Bleak House, which he had reread recently. He began firing away, naming book after book I hadn't read in years. "What about Jane Austen, have you read her?" "What about Herman Hesse, have you read him?" on and on. We talked about Mary McCarthy, who like him was from Seattle; he owned a house in Seattle and rented it to a movie star's siblings.

Though I found this man far too with-it for my company, and felt waves of inadequacy washing over me as we continued our discussions of library and lineage, I did find it endearing that when he had cleaned his plate he asked if he could have a tew of my fries. That's the sign of a youthful man.

"It was lovely, Jane," he said at the end of the evening. "I mean it."

"That's what they all say," I told him, and gave him a peck.

I didn't know why someone didn't want to have his children, and thought maybe that woman back there in his past should wake up and smell the Starbucks.

As for me, I have miles to go before I marry, or probably before I next date someone.

I thought a little bit about my friend with the blue collar hadn't I always needed a shrink? And then I thought about a nice fellow with whom I'd slipped into the habit of reading the Sunday Times at the Hungarian Pastry Shoppe, and about a nice gentlemanly fellow from Virginia that I'd met at a party on a long weekend home who had just sent me a handwritten poem. He couldn't understand why in the world I wanted to live in expensive, difficult New York when life in Richmond was so much easier.

I hailed a cab, a habit I hadn't often indulged in before writing this story, and rode on home in the rain, yawning and humming Miles Davis's version of "Well You Needn't. ' Though it makes life tough on a gal, living in this bizarre city, there is something good about working hard, even ifliving in Manhattan means working hard at everything from doing laundry to meeting men to walking the schnauzer. Sometimes it's difficult to sort out the priorities. Would I go home and call one of my new gentleman friends, or perhaps someone who wasn't the Right Stuff at all? Would I finally call it a night?

In the end I crawled under the covers and shut off the world. I wanted to rise early and start work on this story before I got to the office. Lately, my night life had been intruding on my work schedule.

One guy said he was a "good looking Jewish guy (at least my mother thinks so)."

Then again, what made him think I knew how to write about kissing?

JANE HODGES lives in New York where she writes for Advertising Age and is completing a master's in short fiction at Sarah Lawrence.