To Paradise

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 animaclass="underline" 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