The Dying Animal by Philip Roth Page A

mixer, but the somewhat older women are, by their mid-thirties, so busy with their work that many of them, I discover, now resort to professional matchmakers to find men for them. And at a certain age they stop meeting new people anyway. As one of the disillusioned told me, "Who are the new people when you
do
meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're
people."
    The matchmakers range in price for what is a year's membership, during which time a certain number of introductions are guaranteed. Some matchmakers charge a couple hundred dollars, some a couple of thousand, and one I was told about, who specializes in what she calls "quality people," arranges introductions—up to twenty-five over two years—for no less than twenty-one thousand dollars. I thought I misheard when I was told this, but, yes, twenty-one thousand bucks is the fee. Well, it's hard on women engaging in this kind of transaction in order to find a man to marry them and to father children; no wonder they turn up late at night to sit and talk to their elderly ex-teacher, and sometimes, in their loneliness, even to stay over. Recently one of them was here trying to recover from having just been dumped in mid-meal on a first date by a man she described as "an extreme-vacation type, a superduper adventurer into hunting lions and wild surfing." "It's rough out there, David," she told me. "Because it isn't even dating, it's just
trying
to date. I've stoically accepted the matchmaking," she said, "but not even
that
works."
    Elena, kindhearted Elena Hrabovsky, who's gone prematurely gray, maybe
from
the matchmaking. I said to her, "It must be a huge strain, the strangers, the silences, even the conversation," and she asked me, "Do you think it's supposed to be like this when you're as successful as I am?" Elena is an ophthalmologist, you see, up from the bottom of the working class by dint of immense fortitude. "Life baffles you," she told me, "and you become a very self-protective person and just say the hell with it. It's a great shame, but you run out of steam. Some of these men are more attractive than the average Joe. Educated. Most of them are making good livings. And I'm just never attracted to these people," she told me. "Why is it so boring to be with them? Maybe it's boring because I'm boring," she said. "Guys pick you up in nice cars. BMWs. Classical music on the way. Take you to nice little restaurants, and most of the time I sit there thinking, Please, Lord, just let me go home. I want kids, I want a family, I want a home," Elena said, "but though I have the emotional and physical wherewithal to spend six, seven, eight hours on my feet in the operating room, I don't have it anymore for this humiliation.
Some
of them find me impressive, at least." "Why shouldn't they? You're a retina specialist. You're an eye surgeon. You keep people from going blind." "I know. I mean flat-out rejection," she said, "I'm not built for that." "No one is," I told her, but that didn't seem to help. "I've given it a fair shot," she said, getting teary, "haven't I, David? Nineteen dates?" "My God," I said, "you more than have."
    Elena was a mess that night. She stayed right through till dawn, when she rushed off to scrub up at the hospital. Neither of us got much sleep because I was lecturing on the necessity of her giving up on the idea of becoming coupled and because she was listening like the diligent, serious, note-taking student she'd been when we'd first met in my classroom. But whether I helped her I don't know. Elena's intelligent, tremendously capable, yet for her the desire for a child is the standard unthinking. Yes, the idea activates the propagative instinct, and that's the pathos of it, all right. But it's still part of the standard unthinking: you go on to the next step. It's so primitive for someone so accomplished. But this is the way she imagined adulthood long, long ago, before adulthood, before