by S. J. Maher
Then I go to the bathroom to do my makeup and poof my hair, trying to look like a Jersey mall rat out on the town.
16
My cheeks burned and my legs were wobbly as I left Wayne and Rebecca. I felt hurt by their inattention and worried about the exchange with the awful Alvin. I wanted to get away but didn’t feel that I could, so I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and decided to take a pill. I had no Xanax, so decided to make do with an Ambien. Just popping it gave me the reassuring feeling that soon I’d feel a little numb.
I took a deep breath and headed back to the bar.
Dave was mixing cocktails, chilling glasses with dry ice and shaking his cocktail shaker in a showy way, instead of just pouring drinks. Everyone was thirsty, staring at him, thinking, Hurry the fuck up.
I felt anxious standing there by myself while everyone else was mingling, so I lowered my head to my phone to pretend I was busy with something. I popped open Bumble and left-swiped randomly through the stream of dudes, not seeing anyone who caught my eye.
Then, whoops, there was Kevin’s weird face in a bathroom selfie.
Kevin, 28.
IT professional.
City College.
Info: Chicago guy enjoying the heck out of NYC.
Interests: Classic rock, South Indian food, outdoor activities, finding the truth.
Although we worked in the same office, I didn’t know much about him. He and Beatrice were friends, but I never hung out with them. I flicked through his pics. In the first he was at the Manhattan entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge, striding toward the camera, wearing skinny jeans and a thrift store cardigan with a deer on it. There was a pic of him drinking beer on the patio of a Brooklyn dive with some friends, a shot of him on a nature trail, a picture of him at a museum, and a selfie of him standing, looking serious, outside a school.
Someone jostled me from behind and I looked up.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, startled. “Kevin!”
He turned to me, apparently not noticing that I was standing next to him, and gave me a half smile.
“Oh, hi, Candace. How’s the phone?”
I laughed.
“Great. You will not believe this but I was just using it to look through Bumble and guess whose profile I found?”
His half smile froze.
“No idea,” he said. “Who?”
He looked away as if to compose himself and then looked me in the eye. It was unnatural, robotic.
“Yours!” I said and held it up to show him.
He looked rattled.
“That’s not really a thing,” he said. “I mean, I don’t use it. A friend told me I should set it up, so I did, and I tried it out but I decided it’s not for me. I need to delete it.”
What to say? I don’t care, weirdo.
“It’s a silly way for me to waste time, like when I’m waiting forever for a drink,” I said. “I only ever swipe left.”
“Right. Of course. So did you meet Alvin? That’s why you’re here, right?”
“I did. He kind of freaked me out.”
He arched an eyebrow.
“What did he say?”
I realized I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to talk to him at all.
“Nothing really. He was kind of . . . raunchy. Not what I’m used to. I’m from Connecticut.”
“He’s an interesting man. Did you know he actually knows the president?”
“Trump?”
He looked at me like I was stupid.
“That’s his name.”
“I did not know that.”
“There he is!” said Kevin, looking across the bar to where Alvin was waving his arms and talking to a drunk-looking, overly pierced young woman.
He turned to survey the room while she laughed at whatever he said. He spotted Kevin and me and waved. Kevin waved back.
I was afraid he’d come over. I didn’t want to talk to him.
“Time for me to get another drink,” I said. “See you later.”
I left without waiting for him to say good-bye and pressed myself closer to the bar. Looking over my shoulder I could see Alvin approaching Kevin. He looked around the bar. I didn’t want him to see me, so I ducked behind a guy in front of me.
He looked over his shoulder at me.
“Hoiding farm alpha, are ye?” he said.
He had fine, spiky black hair, pale, stubbled skin, and bright blue eyes. He was wearing a crisp open-collared shirt and a slim-cut blue suit and had a chic-looking laptop bag over his shoulder.
I blinked at him and stammered.
“Pardon?”
“Hiding from Alvin, are you?”
“Oh,” I said. Right. Burry Irish accent. “Yes. Just a bit.”
I felt myself blush.
“Right. All right. I’ll hide ya, Red.”
He stepped between me and Alvin.
“I think he’s looking for ya,” he said, out of the side of his mouth.
“Don’t kid. That’s mean.”
“Seriously. He’s looking for someone. Might not be you, I suppose. Why would he be looking for you? He fancy you?”
I tried to make myself smaller. We were now standing with our backs to each other, talking over our shoulders at each other.
“No. Well, I don’t know. He just hired me. He gave me a funny look and told me he likes investing because of the ‘interesting pussy.’ ”
I made quote marks in the air.
He laughed and turned around and I blushed again.
“Coast’s clear,” he said. “He went out on the balcony with a balding hipster.”
I sighed with relief and I think I smiled at him.
He gave me a funny little smile back.
“I have two questions for you,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said, trying to maintain my poise.
“Number one: Did you just make quote-mark signs with your fingers?”
I laughed.
“Yes. How could you tell?”
“I heard it in your voice. Number two: Are you Candace Walker?”
How did he know that?
“I am. And you are?”
“Declan Walsh,” he said.
His hand was cool and firm and strong.
“Have we met?”
“Only on Twitter. I’m @ShouldBObvious.”
“Wow. Nice to meet you! Wow.”
I was actually excited. We were Twitter friends, having traded wisecracks about knucklehead social media self-promoters.
“I recognize you from your legendary selfies.”
I was flustered and flattered.
I really liked @ShouldBObvious on Twitter. He was funny and smart. But I’d had no idea who he was in real life.
“I didn’t recognize you because you never post selfies, which is lame AF.”
“Not many people know that I’m @ShouldBObvious,” he said. “Like, five people. It’s sort of a secret identity.”
“It was. Now I know.”
“I should have sworn you to secrecy.”
I took out my phone, as if to check it, then snapped a quick picture of him.
“Hey,” he said. “No fair.”
He was frowning with surprise.
I showed him the picture, turning so that we were rubbing shoulders, which felt a bit cheeky.
“I’m looking forward to sharing this with the world via social media,” I said.
“You could blackmail me with that. I’d best be on my best behavior.”
“You’d best.”
We were finally at the bar. We got four Paper Planes.
“I don’t have to reveal your big secret,” I said. “We can negotiate.”
We strolled toward the upper terrace.
“What do you want in return?” he asked.
I peeked around the corner and spied Alvin talking to Rebecca and Wayne.
“You can start by delivering these drinks to the lovely girl and the gentleman talking to Alvin.”
&n
bsp; “You mean the beautiful Rebecca?”
“Yes.”
“I shall deliver these to them in exchange for a ninety-six-hour embargo on my secret identity.”
He took the drinks and strode off onto the balcony.
17
It feels so good to drink a beer again.
I’m at the end of the bar at Lucky 7, across from the jukebox, next to a mirrored pillar, with my black backpack at my feet, my jean jacket over the back of my stool, and most of a $5 pint of beer in front of me next to my Moleskine.
That means that with tip I’m down to $75, but I don’t care. I need to have a beer or six.
And I need to make friends. That will likely get easier when the place gets a little fuller and everybody, including me, gets a little drunker. For now, I’ll keep writing.
I am able to check myself out in the mirrored pillar, and I have to say I’m looking fairly cute, if your taste runs to Jersey mall rats.
My brown hair is styled, my makeup freshened. And the tank is the right size for my sister, but too small for me, so my cute little blue bra straps peek out.
I look like someone else, which is what I want, although I don’t really like the look of the person in the mirror. Still, I have to admit, she looks loose and friendly, which is the idea.
The bartender, who has big muscles covered with tribal tats, seems to think so. He keeps smiling at me. I fight my instinct to ice him, as I normally would, remember that I’m here to make friends, and force myself to smile back.
“You look better with a smile,” he says, like he doesn’t have the faintest clue how totally rapey that is.
I don’t get it. Half of my social media feed is made up of women explaining how that kind of comment is belittling and sexist, to the point that I’m sick of reading the same messages, but then you go into a dive bar and some meathead tells you to smile, like it’s his prerogative to advise you on your appearance, that he assumes your role in life is to please him.
I hate him but I force myself to turn it up a little. I need the bartender to like me.
“What you writin’?” he asks.
“My life story.”
“Is it interesting?”
“Not yet.”
I close my journal and smile more at him.
I need to make friends.
Our terrible flirtation is interrupted by the arrival of a boy carrying a guitar case. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t seem that cute when you first look at him but gets cuter on closer inspection. Big brown eyes. A little stubble. Long, messy hair.
He is, of course, in the band that will play here tonight, and he needs to know where they can park their van. Tattooed bartender goes to find out, which leaves cute boy standing there next to me.
Well, hello.
I take a sip of my beer and don’t look at him.
He pulls out his phone and flicks through it, bored. He puts it back in his pocket.
“Hey,” he says. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Depends what it is.”
“How come you aren’t looking at your phone? You’re just sitting at the bar, not reading your phone. Nobody does that anymore.”
I smile at him.
“I’ve decided to take a break from my phone, just to see if I can live without it.”
I lean over and take a sip of foam from my fresh second beer.
“Wow,” he says. “Awesome. I’ve thought about doing that. How’s it going?”
“Awful.”
He introduces himself. Pat is an adorable puppy of a boy, with a shy little private smile.
“I kind of hate my phone,” he says as he waits for the bartender. “I hate the way I can’t stop myself from looking at it whenever I’m not doing anything else.”
“That’s what I’m trying to get away from. I want to work on my attention span.”
He nods enthusiastically, like he knows precisely what I mean but didn’t know it until the moment I said it.
“Exactly. It’s like the world’s stupidest addiction,” he says. “Like, I could be addicted to cocaine or Oxy or something fun, but instead it’s my stupid Android.”
I laugh.
“I hate it. Happens all the time. I’m practicing my guitar, reading a book, pleasuring myself, whatever, and I suddenly think: I should check my phone. Then I’m reading some stupid thing on Twitter or looking at a cat video.”
I find myself giggling, not fake-trying-to-make-friends giggling, but actually giggling.
“That’s what I miss,” I say. “Blanking out.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Only four days. I got into a fight with Verizon, which they won, and I thought: time for a little break.”
“You going to get another one?”
“Maybe after I finish my thesis.”
I had worked out my story as I drank my beer.
I am Lisa, a master’s student in English literature at Cornell. I came down for the weekend with my friend, Samantha, to stay with her at her boyfriend’s place in Hoboken. But we got drunk in the Village last night and she fell and broke her ankle, and I don’t have my license, and now I’m stuck here and need to get back upstate. But I have no phone, which sucks, because I can’t get in touch with anybody.
Pat buys my bullshit story.
“Really? Wow. Tough weekend.”
Then Sexist Tatman is back, with parking information, and Pat is gone.
“Did you finish your life story?” says the bartender.
“Working on it,” I say.
My hand is cramped and ink-stained but I want to finish writing the part about the party.
18
I was chatting with a cute rando when Declan came back from delivering the drinks. I let him wait for just a minute before kissing off the other guy and turning to him.
“Mission accomplished?”
He nodded.
He led me away to two open stools at the edge of the lower patio. We sat and looked at the flat Brooklyn rooftops and a lot full of trucks surrounded by a high steel fence.
“So how do you know Alvin?” I asked.
“I own one of those trucks down there. They’re full of antique Irish guns. I’m here for an exhibition at the Flatbush Museum of Arms. He’s on the board.”
“Really? Wow.”
“No. Not really. I work for iMetrics.”
“Jerk,” I said and punched him on the arm. “I believed you!”
He laughed.
“So that explains why you’re so smart about social media stuff,” I said. “I mean, kind of smart. Not totally stupid.”
Oh sheesh.
iMetrics is a behind-the-scenes social media powerhouse. Their stock has twice doubled in the past couple years after they convinced Facebook to let them help with their data sorting.
The value of most social media enterprises is the information they collect on customers. Every email you send, every Facebook post you make is a tiny bit of information that, properly sorted, is worth money.
iMetrics was better at fracking data than anyone, pushing it past the point of creepiness. They were the first, for example, to tell tampon retailers to time their social media ads to the time of the month when their customers would be thinking about buying tampons, which they could do by cross-referencing drugstore loyalty program data with Facebook profiles. And they did it all without attracting unwelcome attention, because they were, so far as anyone knew, doing things ethically and legally, employing as many lawyers as programmers. If anyone might know how to make Cheese of the Month work, it would be Declan.
“If you give me some advice about my first social media client,” I said, “I might be prepared to extend the embargo on your secret identity still further.”
“Maybe. What kind of timeline are we talking about here? I may need to get plastic surgery in Venezuela.”
“How about thirty days?”
“Ninety. And that’s firm. I need time for the scars to heal. Let me get mo
re drinks. Guard my laptop.”
My third Paper Plane was empty but they didn’t seem to be affecting me.
“Sure.”
When he went to the bar, I sat down, pulled out my phone, and went to iMetrics’s website. There he was, on the Who We Are page: Declan Walsh, Vice President for North America.
Rich, young, handsome social media genius with a cute accent. Out of my league. Best squeeze him for info while maintaining what dignity I could.
When he came back with drinks, I explained the Cheese of the Month project. We were seated side by side, looking out over the city.
“Hm,” he said, when I was done. “Have you got any data?”
I shook my head.
“No addresses? Subscription list from Cheese Lovers Monthly?”
“Nope.”
“Budget?”
“Zero.”
“Well,” he said, frowning. “It’s a very twentieth-century idea, cheese by mail. I don’t see the demand. The grocery chains are good at figuring out what customers want. I know, because I sell them data. And even if you were to find the demographic that for some reason loves cheese but lives far from a decent cheese shop—French professors in small college towns, say—I find it hard to imagine they’ll be a growth market.”
“I don’t need a long-term plan. I need to produce a little bump, get some pecorino out the door, so they’ll give me something else to do.”
He made his hands into a steeple and pursed his lips.
“You need data.”
“What kind of data?”
He smiled, raised an eyebrow, and took a sip of his drink.
“The kind of data you can’t get without money,” he said and leaned back on his stool. “Ideally, you want to know who loves cheese and lives far from cheese shops. You want the kind of data Facebook and Google have.”
“Or iMetrics,” I said, taking a big sip of my cocktail. I made my innocent face.
He smiled and narrowed his eyes.
“Or iMetrics. But they don’t give that kind of data away. It’s money. Nobody gives away proprietary information because some hot redhead at a party asks for it, even if she’s superfuckable.”
Grrr. I can’t believe he said that.
“Well, thanks for saying that I’m ‘fuckable,’ ” I said, making air quotes. “But for the record, I haven’t asked you for anything, except advice. What I am not asking you for, just so we are clear, is proprietary information.”