I turned heel smartly and checked said desk, where two new articles had found their way into the wire tray that controlled my fact-checking inflow. Yes, I was a fact-checker. That was my official duty, anyway; Tibby’s coffee was for free and for the understanding that a year or two of perfectly delivered joe might lead to bigger and better things.
Not that fact-checking constituted a minor patch of sand on the sunny Metropolitan beach. No no no. Our writers were brilliant wordsmiths, elegant stylists, provocative storytellers, but they rarely let an inconvenient fact get in the way of a good exposez-vous. My job was to check these baser impulses—note the double meaning—and level the Metropolitan’s chances of a messy libel lawsuit from an embarrassed husband, a shamed politician, a misbehaving starlet.
And as it turned out, I had a truffle pig’s nose for a rotten fact. Jocular reference to a Napoleonic princess giving birth to an heir and a spare? Hardly apropos, when Consuelo Vanderbilt bitterly coined the term in 1895. Andover graduate claims he gave Jack Kennedy a concussion at the Choate game in 1934? Must have occurred in an alternative universe in which pigs took wing and Andover played Choate that season.
This particular Monday morning, however, I was having an itty-bitty problem with the fact-checking, at least of the sort that I was being paid so unhandsomely to do. As I stood in the Metropolitan’s private library, poring over an encyclopedia entry for P. G. Wodehouse, my eyes kept darting to the volume that contained the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, known in imperial bygones as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut.
And a few minutes later, as I made notes about varieties of Indian tea versus those from China, I closed my eyes quite out of the blue and recalled how my fingers had traced along Doctor Paul’s interesting clavicle on Saturday night, how he had turned me onto my belly and stretched me long and wide and bit my shoulder very gently . . .
“Vivs! There you are.”
“Gogo. You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl.”
She turned me around. “Why, you’re flushed! Do you have a fever? Can I get you some water?”
“No, honey. Just a passing whatever. You’re looking particularly perfect this morning.”
“Do you think so?” She fluffed her pale hair and leaned forward, woman to woman. “He’s coming today, Vivs.”
“Who’s coming? Your honey bun?”
“Yes!” Gogo darted a look around my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and made like a bandit for the corner of the library. “I didn’t want to say anything. I had just about given up on him.”
“What, Mr. Perfect? I thought you were madly in love.”
“We were. I thought we were. And then . . . well, you know what it’s like. That feeling when he’s losing interest.” She sighed.
“But you’ve had new flowers on your desk every week.”
“Most weeks.”
“And . . . and you’ve gone out on dates every Saturday night.”
“Most Saturday nights.”
“And he moved to New York to be with you, didn’t he? After all your reckless passion over the summer?”
Now the blush. “Well, I don’t know about reckless passion . . .”
I chucked her flawless chin. “You were madly in love. Admit it.”
“Madly, Vivs.” She took my hands. “He’s the handsomest, smartest, kindest, most gentlemanly—”
“Et cetera, et cetera, ne plus ultra, to the ends of terra firma—”
“Aw, Vivs. You know I wasn’t any good at Latin.”
I smiled and squeezed her hands. “Look at your shining eyes. He’s a lucky man, this Mr. Perfect.”
“His name is David, Vivs. Da-vid.” She said it slowly, as if I might not have heard the handle before.
“David Perfect.” I waved my hand. “So why the doubt? Surely Mr. David Perfect wants to make you Mrs. David Perfect? Who better for the job than the loveliest girl in the history of Bryn Mawr College, Hepburn included?”
“Hardly.”
“And the sweetest.”
“Oh, Vivs. You’re too much.” Bubbly bubbles of laughter. “I know I was silly to doubt him; he’s not the kind of man who would ever lead a girl on. I think he must have been distracted with his new job. You know how demanding his job can be.”
I ransacked the old vault, trying to locate some mention of Mr. David Perfect’s mode of employment amid the endless reels of Gogo’s pleasant background chatter while I was checking my facts. But. Look. I couldn’t even remember the man’s first name without prompting. What chance did his career have? I considered the possibilities: lawyer, banker, broker, doctor.
Ha, ha. Doctor. Wouldn’t that be funny.
“I know,” I said. “So terribly, awfully demanding, that job of his.”
“You see? And I was right. Listen to me, Vivs.” Conspiratorial whisper. “He rang me up last night.”
“He didn’t!”
“He did! He wants to have lunch with me today. He has something very important to tell me, he says.” She crushed my wrists with the force of her glee. “Very important. I just know he’s going to propose, Vivs! How do I look?” Elegant twirl.
I rubbed my grateful wrists. “You look the same as always. Which is to say, no working candles for miles around.”