TALL, blond and graceful, Cheryl Lee Terry looks more like an Ivory soap model than someone who reads palms and numerology charts.
Ms. Terry, who is 46, writes the numerology column for Elle magazine and counsels thousands of private clients, ranging from F.B.I. agents looking for criminals, to politicians, playwrights and scientists wondering about their love lives. She also advises couples wishing to set an auspicious wedding date.
"When John Avedon got married to Maura Moynihan, I spent two hours on the phone with John, choosing the date," she said. "You want to make sure there's no war breaking out that day, no negative numbers."
Ms. Terry's own love life was mapped out years ago during a consultation with the numerologist Florence Meschner. Madly in love at the time, Ms. Terry had asked if she would soon become engaged. She was told instead that she would meet her true soul mate, a tall foreigner, "later in life."
The prediction turned out to be eerily accurate. When she was 40, a friend introduced her to Gerard Potier, a 6-foot-4 French businessman.
On Feb. 13, they were married at Park City's Baptist Church in Dallas, the bride's hometown. "It was destiny," said Mr. Potier, 49, who is soft-spoken and accustomed to making predictions of an economic sort. He is the co-owner of B & H/Potier Partners, a shipping brokerage and consulting company in New York.
The reception took place on Feb. 19 in Vivian and Nathan Serota's art-filled and gardenia-scented apartment on Park Avenue. (The bride calls Mrs. Serota her New York Auntie Mame.) In the entryway, a white marble sculpture of a headless torso, by Igor Mitoraj, sat next to a painting by Miro.
"It was like a wedding reception in the Matisse exhibit," Pamela Keogh, an editor at Us magazine, who had been a guest, said a few days afterward. "Only it was easier to get in, and there were hot hors d'oeuvres."
The eclectic mix of guests included Regis Pagniez, the publications director of Elle; Antoine Bernheim, a money manager, and Steve Marcus, a cartoonist whose work -- he described it as "one-liners about the slacker generation" -- regularly appears on MTV.
A few guests were loyal clients of the bride's, like Holly Millea, a senior editor at Premier magazine, who said: "I've broken up with guys because she said, 'This isn't going to last, and it's just a way for you to kill the time.' So I think, if I'm going to kill time, I'd rather be working out in the gym."
At the reception, Ms. Terry wore a silk, Grace Kelly-esque gown loaned by VanLear Bridals Inc. of New York. Her original gown, also a VanLear, had been shipped from Texas but was lost in transit. "I should have known," she said. "Mercury went into retrograde today."
The dinner of filet mignon and salmon was catered by Penny Glazier, who opened Bridgewaters, a special-events company on Fulton Street, only after a consultation with Ms. Terry.
After dinner, as the newlyweds cut the Sylvia Weinstock wedding cake, they blushed like teen-agers on a great date.
A few days earlier, the bride had said: "Sometimes I look at people's charts and say, 'It's going to come late for you,' and they say, 'But I'll be over 40 years old.' I have to tell them, 'That is absolutely the best time to fall in love!' "
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