Marrying Up

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“You can go now,” I tell them.

I whip my compact out of my purse while George slumps down as far as she can without completely disappearing under the table. True, I am a little more made-up than usual, but I figured the occasion called for a touch of sophistication. As for George’s hair, it is undeniably large.

Scanning the room, I suppose we’re a bit out of place. The only other women in Taylor’s are the waitresses and a few frumpy accountant types. I am definitely the only one with an attempt at an updo, while George’s cleavage apparently speaks a thousand words.

“Can we get out of here, Holly? Please?”

“Fine. But don’t look so glum. This is going to make a great ‘What Not to Do’ appendix for the book.”

George reluctantly agrees to give my tactics some more thought as we scarf down Chinese takeout in the cab on the way back to my place. If it were easy, I reason, then everyone would be doing it. Chapter One will just have to wait until we are a little further into the game.

chapter 5

The Mind of the Moneyed Man

“Just look into the camera and relax, sweetie.”

It sounds like a line from a bad afterschool special.

I take a deep breath and begin: “Hi everyone! Okay, so I may not be a blond bombshell like Marilyn Monroe, but there must be at least one fabulous, semidecent-looking rich guy out there who’s seriously into flat-chested brunettes.”

I can see George shaking her head in my peripheral vision.

Violet Chase, the ageless madam behind the Buffalo branch of the Moneyed Mates franchise, is similarly unimpressed. “That was appalling, Ms. Hastings,” she says as she comes over to flick a speck off my shoulder.

“Just needed to break the tension, I guess.”

“We’ll pretend it never happened. Let’s do a few more takes. Just try and relax. And remember the guidelines we talked about. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention money! It’s incredibly inelegant,” she says as she stalks off the “set” to take her place beside the cameraman.

“Okay,” I agree. “But it’s kinda hard to relax when this is, like, the one impression they’re going to have of me.”

“Would you like half a Valium?” she offers.

I look hopefully to George, whose wrinkled forehead and downturned eyebrows relay a stern “No.”

“No, thank you,” I tell Ms. Chase. “But it was nice of you to ask.”

After the whole hooker fiasco, George and I tried to be more discriminating in our choice of both evening wear and hunting grounds. We’d staked out a few hotel bars—most notably, the Mansion on Delaware Avenue, the only place in town where I could imagine a really wealthy person might stay—but we just ended up getting to know the bartender better than we wanted to and drinking away half a paycheck’s worth of Harvey’s Bristol Cream in about a month. Plus, George gained nearly five pounds from the nuts at the bar (I’m sure the alcohol had nothing to do with it). On Saturdays and Sundays, we walked Linus, her fat beagle, in circles around the Mercedes dealership on Main Street near her mothers’ house. Once, we even skipped work and snuck into a hedge-fund conference at the Hilton in Niagara Falls, where we learned that most professional financial planners work with other people’s money, not their own—a fact confirmed by their willingness to embrace the most revolting assortment of cold salads in lunch-buffet history.

All this work and nary a nibble at the line, yet alone a dinner invitation. It seems Buffalo just doesn’t have rich men growing on trees, if you can believe that. We needed a way to kick things up a notch. And that was where Moneyed Mates came in.

George had stumbled across a scathing indictment of their operations in an article Mrs. Perlman had suggested she read in The Advocate regarding the appalling state of contemporary American heterosexual mating habits. I was surprised George had even mentioned it, frankly, since she’d made it clear on numerous occasions that she was just chaperoning me on my little husband-hunting excursions. But it didn’t take long for the truth to come out.