“What’s this?” you ask. “Abbie went to drug counseling?”
Tim nods. “It was part of her rehab program. The most effective way to prevent a relapse is to go on seeing a counselor regularly.”
You sit back, thinking. It seems to you that what Tim had taken for drug-induced mood swings—a little too happy sometimes—might equally be the highs and lows of a secret love affair. But you’re not going to say so, at least not until you have proof.
And a plan, too; what to do with that information.
What were those words he spoke to you last night? I had to build the right tools. That’s all you are to him, you realize. An appliance. Like a socket wrench or a motorized screwdriver.
Well, this tool has a mind of her own. And she’s going to start using it.
51
“I must admit,” Megan Meyer says cheerfully, “I never expected to see you here.”
The matchmaker’s offices are in San Mateo, equidistant from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. You came in an Uber, summoned with a tap on your phone. You could even use the app to choose the playlist on the car’s stereo, thus ensuring the driver didn’t talk to you. As you crawled through the endless traffic you found yourself reflecting that, really, no one needed robots or driverless cars, when human beings were already this automated.
Megan’s offices were much as you expected. A water feature burbled in the reception area. There were fresh flowers in alcoves, tasteful art was hung on the walls, and the magazines in the lobby ranged from MIT Technology Review to The Economist.
Megan herself, though, was a surprise. You’d been expecting someone like Judy Hersch the news anchor, coiffed and brittle. But although Megan is equally well groomed and even more expensively dressed, her eyes are shrewd and humorous.
“I used to be a headhunter, filling leadership roles in start-ups,” she confides as she leads you into her office. “But so many of my clients asked if I had any friends they could date, I realized there was no one catering to that side of their lives. Tech people might be able to write the code for a dating app, but they’d be the very worst at using it. They don’t have the social skills to decode profiles, they tend to choose on appearance rather than personality, and when they do date, they often have no clue how to behave. So my pitch to them is, no swiping, just old-fashioned matchmaking. Besides, I’m good at it. I’m curious about people. And I genuinely believe that everyone, however strange they may seem, has a soulmate out there somewhere.”
You realize something else about Megan: She’s one of the very few people who immediately talks to you like a person, rather than a machine.
“What about Abbie?” you say as you take a seat on one of Megan’s two enormous sofas. “Was she Tim Scott’s soulmate?”
“Well, he thought so. And he’s my client, so…” She smiles.
“But you weren’t sure?”
She hesitates, then leans forward. “Look, I probably shouldn’t say this. But I knew two things the moment I met Abbie Cullen. First, that Tim was going to fall in love with her. Heck, he was already in love with her. That’s why I made a point of going to talk to her that day. He’d just ignored every single one of the women I was trying to pitch him and gone on and on about this incredible artist he’d hired.” She sits back again. “And second, I knew it would end in tears.”
“Why?”
“Do you know what I mean by Galatea syndrome?”
You shake your head.
“The men who start tech companies…they tend to be a particular type. First, they have impossibly high standards. Second, they have a vision. Which is to say, a view of the world. Often they like nothing better than to impart that view to some receptive, impressionable young person. If the young person is fresh and sweet and drop-dead gorgeous, too, so much the better. And, to be fair, the younger person is often just as keen to learn as the older one is to teach.
“But fast-forward a few years, and the dynamic has shifted. The older person still has the vision, but the younger one has heard it all before. And they’re probably not so sweet and fresh anymore, either. So, inevitably, they move on.”
“Why’s it called Galatea syndrome?”
“From an ancient Greek myth. About a sculptor called Pygmalion, who rejected all the women of Cyprus as frivolous and wanton. Until one day, he carved a statue of a woman so beautiful and pure, he couldn’t help falling in love with it. At which point the statue came to life and loved him right back. He called her Galatea. I guess today we’d say he fell in love with an ideal, rather than a person.”
“I think I know how that feels. On the receiving end, I mean.”
Megan nods. “I did suggest to Tim that jumping into marriage with a woman a decade younger than him, someone he’d only known for a few months, wasn’t wise. But Tim believes in being decisive. The best I could do was get the two of them to sit down and talk through a prenup.”
“I did wonder about that. I read it this morning. It seemed quite…draconian.” You’d wondered if Megan even deliberately set the marriage up to fail, hoping for repeat business.
“The point of the prenup is never the prenup,” she says flatly. “The point of the prenup is, first, to get two idealistic, loved-up individuals to be honest about what their expectations for this relationship are. And second, to provide some kind of road map for a healthy marriage.” She waves a hand in the direction of Silicon Valley. “Most of my clients couldn’t navigate a cocktail party without a list of step-by-step instructions, preferably written in Python or JavaScript. I like to think that by incorporating things like date nights, vacations, and non-work days into a prenup, I’m giving them some sort of blueprint for normality.”
“I think Tim may have taken it more literally than you intended. Getting Abbie to take a drug test every time she seemed a bit too cheerful.”
“Yes. Well, I did what I could to get them both over that particular road bump.”
“What do you mean?”
Megan only lifts an eyebrow, but you immediately guess. “Abbie failed the drug test. She failed, but you told Tim she’d passed.”
Megan hesitates, as if deciding how much to tell you. “Not exactly. According to the hair analysis, she was clean for coke and other class-A drugs. But it showed high levels of alcohol. That wasn’t covered by the prenup, so officially it was none of my business. But I sat her down and read her the riot act anyway. Even though it wasn’t her who was my client, I felt responsible for her. Protective, even. She was always this sweet, optimistic person, and then her kid got that horrible condition…It can’t have been easy.”
“What did she say when you did that?”
“She swore she was talking to her drug counselor about it. That she was determined to make the marriage work, for Danny’s sake if nothing else.” Megan shrugs. “She was probably lying. All addicts lie. Drinkers, too—to themselves, mostly. I should know. I used to be one.”
You think. Megan assumed Abbie was lying because she was a drinker who wasn’t going to stop. But what if Abbie had been planning to leave, even then? And what if the drinking wasn’t the cause of the marriage breakdown, but a consequence of it?
“When was this?” you ask.
Megan pinches the bridge of her nose while she thinks. “Roughly the middle of July.”
Three months before Abbie left. Perhaps it wasn’t only Tim who’d been in love with an ideal, you reflect. Perhaps Abbie, too, had had a kind of fantasy of a perfect life: a perfect marriage, perfect children, a wealthy and successful husband. When that dream collapsed, had her first response been to dull the reality with alcohol, and her second to flee altogether?
You feel a flash of sympathy—sympathy you’re careful to suppress. Abbie’s flaws were human, certainly. But her flaws are also your strengths. You will never be addicted to alcohol or drugs. Your decisions will never be clouded by medication or idealism or lust.
“If you thought Abbie was wrong for Tim,” you say, “who would have been right?”
Megan’s smile fades. “Pygmalion fell in love with his own creation. Because only his own creation could truly live up to the ideal inside his head. Not to mention, remain untainted by all the weakness and vanity he perceived, or thought he perceived, in flesh-and-blood women.” She points an elegantly manicured finger at you. “Frankly, I’d say you’re a far better match for Tim Scott than the real Abbie could ever be. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”
52
You’re heading back to the city in another Uber, thinking over what Megan told you, when Tim calls.
“Where are you?” he wants to know. “Is that traffic I can hear?”
“Just doing some shopping.” An idea occurs to you. “For tonight. I’m cooking something special. Can you be home by eight?”
“Hmm—sounds intriguing. I’ll try.”
After he hangs up you pop open the SIM holder and remove the card. You don’t want Tim going on Find My Phone to check your whereabouts.
“Change of destination,” you tell the Uber driver.
* * *